


Arcana

by rosa_acicularis



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, F/M, Female John Watson, Genderswap, Magic, Witchcraft, Witches, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-09
Updated: 2013-06-25
Packaged: 2017-12-14 09:37:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 46,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/835447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosa_acicularis/pseuds/rosa_acicularis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Sometimes, her grandmother has said, in the simplest, strongest of magics that’s all that’s required – a sacrifice and an intent. Her blood, and his words: I want to forget.</i>  </p><p>In which Joanna Watson is a witch, Sherlock Holmes is himself, and every spell has its price.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Though I haven't posted a new chapter to this fic in several years, I haven't abandoned it. As of April 2017 I'm still working my way through a draft of the final chapters, and I'm determined to reach the end. 
> 
> When? I have no idea. But I'm definitely going to do it.

_The end is where we start from._

T.S. Eliot

 

 

 

There is a boy in the mirror in her grandmother’s attic.  
  
Joanna first sees him on a Tuesday, just after she arrives home from school. The house is empty, hollowed out by the silence; her sister is at a friend’s, her gran out doing the shopping. The afternoon rain is loud against the windows and roof.  
  
Her grandmother’s house is tall and narrow and warped in odd places, twisted by age and long years of ill use. Joanna flicks on each lamp as she wanders from room to room, exploring the forgotten, dust-choked spaces behind curtains and inside wardrobes. She finds four pennies, a thimble-sized brass bell, and the half-crushed skeleton of a mouse. The pennies and the mouse’s skull she wraps in a page of yellowed newspaper and slips into her pocket – the pennies will go in her tin money bank, and her grandmother might find use for the skull. She leaves the bell behind, on the dark wood windowsill where she found it.  
  
On the third floor, she finds the door to the attic.  
  
The stairs are tight, the ceiling low – twelve years old and not yet five feet tall and still she feels the breathless press of walls and wood and the dark. When she comes to the top, she reaches up and tugs the waxy length of string hanging over her head. A light bulb fizzes and pops, and when her eyes have adjusted she sees the mirror.  
  
There is her reflection, of course – the swinging plait of her sand-coloured hair and the untidy stiffness of her new school uniform. The scuffs on her sister’s old shoes. The mirror is tall, full-length and angled slightly towards the floor; the frame simple, oval, wood. The glass seems darker than it should be – _older than it looks_ , she thinks, and turns to the boxes of family photo albums stacked against the wall.  
  
As she looks away, the reflection changes – a heartbeat-brief glance from over her shoulder and she sees another room inside the mirror, a bed buried under books and sheaves of paper. An impossible room and an impossible bed, and sprawled on top of the impossible mess is a boy with a pale face and dark, curling hair, watching her out of the corner of his eye.  
  
But when she turns back she sees only her reflection, standing in the attic alone.

 

++

 

After school the next day she climbs right up to the attic, sits down in front of the mirror and waits.  
  
“I’ve brought snacks,” she tells the mirror. “You should take this as a sign of my determination.” She pulls the bag of crisps from her coat pocket, and as she lifts her head she sees him.  
  
The angle is odd, different from the day before – he’s above her somehow, kneeling, and beyond the dark halo of his hair she sees the ceiling of his room, the foot of the bed. His face is close, but his eerie, colourless gaze is fixed on something just out of sight. He sees her, but only from the corner of his eye.  
  
She looks directly at him, and he disappears.  
  
“ _Oh_ ,” she breathes, and glances down at the crisps again, her too-long fringe falling into her eyes. At the edge of her vision she sees the boy’s face, and the impatient twitch of his eyebrows. He says something, his mouth forming a quick, soundless series of words – a question, she thinks, but she can’t be sure. She taps her ear once and makes a slashing movement with her hand: _I can’t hear you._  
  
He frowns.  
  
“I don’t suppose you can hear me, either,” she says, and the boy taps his ear in response. Then he reaches for something out of sight, keeping his gaze carefully fixed just to her left. A moment later, he holds up a notepad with the words _How are you doing this?_ written on it in a sharp black-inked scrawl.  
  
“Magic, probably,” she says. “Though you don’t seem like the type to accept that as an explanation.”  
  
The boy taps his ear again, irritated, and she shrugs.  
  
He scribbles on the notepad and holds it up. _What have you done to my mirror?_  
  
“What have you done to mine?” she asks, and startles when heavy footsteps pound up the attic stairs a moment later. She stands, turning her back to the mirror and stuffing the crisps into her pocket.  
  
“Gran told me you’d be hiding up here,” Harry says, her shoulders hunched low as she steps up into the room. Her nose wrinkles delicately. “Jesus. This place smells like a corpse.”  
  
“It’s wood rot, I think,” Joanna says. She sniffs. “Maybe mould?”  
  
Harry swipes a finger along the edge of a nearby box and cringes at the dust. “What are you doing up here, Jo? It’s revolting.”  
  
There was a time, not so long ago, when Joanna told her sister everything. Now she looks at her feet and says, “Thought I might go through the old family albums. Find some photos of Mum.”  
  
Harry’s face goes still and quiet and shuttered, and Joanna hates herself for it, a little. “Yeah,” Harry says, looking away. “Of course. Good idea.” She hesitates, then takes a step into the room. “You want some company?”  
  
“No,” Joanna says, too quickly. “Let’s go downstairs.” She forces a cough. “Smell’s getting to me, I think.”  
  
“It’s probably a mummy or shrunken head or something else dead and cursed and morbid. I bet Gran doesn’t even remember she left it up here.” Harry turns back to the stairs, but she stops just before she reaches the first step. She looks back over her shoulder, frowning. “That mirror—”  
  
Joanna’s breath catches in her throat. “What about it?”  
  
“It’s the only thing in the room without twenty years worth of dust on it.” She walks over, the floorboards creaking under her boots, and touches the glass with one finger. It comes away clean. “No one’s been up here for ages. Did you wash it?”  
  
“No,” Joanna says with perfect honesty. “I haven’t touched it.”  
  
Harry rolls her eyes. “Cursed corpses and magic mirrors. I hate this bloody house.” She disappears down the staircase, boots thumping against each step.  
  
After a moment’s glance at her reflection in the mirror, Joanna follows.

 

++

 

That night Joanna lies awake until just after moonrise.  
  
Harry snores softly from the other side of the room, coiled in blankets and sleeping like the dead. Joanna creeps past, down the staircase to the front hall and the lamp-lit kitchen. She drags a chair from the table to the cluttered shelves above the oven, wincing at the scrape of wooden legs over tile, and when she stands on the edge she’s just tall enough to reach the top shelf.  
  
Gran’s recipe book is heavier than it looks, and it lets loose a low sigh of dust when Joanna drops it onto the kitchen table. The picture on the cheap cardboard cover is stained and worn, but she can still make out the shape of a tall, robed woman and the harvest cornucopia she carries in crook of one arm. The scythe she raises with the other. Joanna turns to the first page and breathes in the bitter smell of old herbs and older paper.  
  
The first few pages are recipes for breads and puddings and stews, some handwritten in a spiked, old-fashioned script and others clipped from the pages of time-yellowed newspapers and magazines. She turns each brittle page carefully, with the tips of her fingers.  
  
Soon she comes to other recipes. _Cure fore the Blight of Baldness_ , says one entry, just above a list of ingredients that includes _three hairs from the head of a newborne child_ and _a paste of burdock, old rain, and crushed eggshells._ According to a note at the bottom of the page, the results are _variable, but only rarely damaging._  
  
 _Words for the Summoning of Toads_ comes along rather further in, as does the slightly less optimistic _Words for the Possible Banishing of Toads_ , which includes a helpful list of concoctions that require toad’s eyes, toad’s bones, or toad’s heart should that recipe prove less effective than the first.  
  
Joanna has seen these pages before, has carried home pocketfuls of crow’s feathers and watched closely as her grandmother prepared decoctions of valerian root for sleeplessness and willow bark for pain. Gran prefers small problems with smaller solutions, but at the back of her stiff-paged book there are recipes for more. Recipes Joanna isn’t meant to read.  
  
 _For the Forcible Return of a Wandering Heart_ , reads the first that requires fresh-spilled human blood. Others ask for locks of hair, for grave soil, for flesh willing or unwillingly given. For the cuttings of fingernails and the bottled breath of sleep. _To Kindle Passion,_ she reads. _To Discover Secrets. To Find What Is Lost._  
  
 _For Forgetting_ , says one page. _For the Forgotten_ , says the next.  
  
There are mentions of rare objects _(poisoned cups, enchanted rings, shells that grant any wish whispered inside)_ and a few of mirrors, but none that describe the mirror in the attic. There are mirrors that show the truth, and others that only show lies. There was once a mirror that showed you your heart’s greatest desire, but it was lost years ago and Joanna knows what she would see in it, if she could.  
  
She slips the recipe book back onto its shelf and returns to bed.

 

++

 

The next time Joanna sees the boy in the mirror he isn’t in his bedroom, and he isn’t alone.  
  
He stands in front of a wide desk in a private study, the walls behind him lined by bookshelves and dark wood. His arms are at his sides, his back held stiff and straight, and Joanna realises for the first time that he’s at least a year younger than she is, if not more. His face and thin-fingered hands are too long for his body, and standing alone with his chin held defiantly high he looks a bit ridiculous, like a puppy who’s yet to grow into his paws. It should be endearing, but it hurts her, somehow, to see him made small.  
  
She cannot see the face of the tall man sitting behind the desk, but she sees the way his hands move as he speaks. His long, expressive fingers, and the dark halo of his hair.  
  
The boy watches her from the corner of his eye, his mouth gone slightly slack with surprise. She’d waited until Harry had fallen asleep to sneak up to the attic, and she’s in her nightdress, her dressing gown tied tight around her waist; she must look like a ghost in yellow-chequered cotton. She gives him an absurd little wave, and for a moment he almost smiles.  
  
Then his father makes a sharp gesture – punctuation for sharp words she cannot hear –and the boy flinches.  
  
He looks away, and the image fades.

 

++

 

After that, they fall into habits.  
  
Joanna spends each afternoon in the attic, drifting through her schoolwork and eating crisps. She unrolls a moth-eaten sleeping bag over the cold attic floorboards and nicks a few ratty pillows from the old sofa in the second floor sitting room; the boy moves his mirror to the edge of his desk, clearing away books and papers so they can see each other as they work. He never seems to do much regular schoolwork – the books he reads have long, embossed titles in French or German, or are science texts so advanced they may as well be in another language, for all she understands of them. Joanna quite likes science – it’s one of her best subjects – but she’s only just learning about gas giants and the different types of stars; it’ll be a few years yet before she’s ready for _Alkaloids and Molecular Methods of Plant Analysis, 2nd Edition._  
  
She doesn’t always see him in his room. Sometimes if she goes to the attic too early on a Sunday morning she’ll see him staring bleary-eyed into his bathroom mirror, half-dressed and skinny and brushing his teeth; once or twice she catches a glimpse of him in the backseat of an expensive car, or walking along a busy street. He takes to carrying a compact mirror in his pocket, and with it he shows her snapshots – the delicate clockwork of a gutted pocket watch, an ill-tended garden, a perfect footprint preserved in dried mud. The solemn, high-ceilinged halls of his school, and the rusted labyrinth of pipes in its cellar.  
  
Once he shows her his mother’s silhouette as she passes in the corridor, a slim, elegant shape that shifts seamlessly from one shadow to the next. Most days his house seems as empty as hers.  
  
One afternoon she writes, _If you give me your name and address, I’ll post you a letter,_ on a blank page at the back of her maths workbook. She waits until he meets her gaze in the mirror, and then holds it up for him to see.   
    
A brief, unreadable expression passes over his too-long face. He reaches for a notepad. _Best not_ , he writes. _I’m much too old to receive letters from imaginary people._  
  
 _Git_ , she writes back, and sticks out her tongue.  
  
She doesn’t mention it again.  

 

++

 

One morning Harry finds her asleep on the attic floor, curled inside the sleeping bag and shuddering with cold.  
  
“This is _insane_ ,” Harry hisses, wrenching Joanna to her feet by one arm. “This is absolute bloody madness, Jo, and you know it.”  
  
Joanna stumbles, her legs still heavy with sleep. Her mouth tastes dry, like chalk. “Sorry,” she murmurs. “Didn’t mean to stay all night – we lost track of time.”  
  
Harry drops her arm. “ _We?_ ”  
  
Caught, Joanna smiles through her panic. “Yeah,” she says. “Me and Gran’s cursed mummy.” She leans forward a little, mockingly, like she’s sharing a confidence. “He doesn’t need much sleep, you see. Being dead and all.”  
  
There’s a flash of hurt in Harry’s eyes before the anger sets in, hard and certain and unforgiving. “Fine,” she says. “Freeze to death. Die of mould poisoning. Stay up here and rot, you selfish little _freak_.”  
  
The attic door slams shut behind her.  

 

++  
  
 

“Four months ago my parents died in a traffic accident,” Joanna tells the boy in the mirror. “No one will say it, but they think it was my dad’s fault.” She takes a shallow, unsteady breath. “I think they’re probably right.”  
  
The boy sets down his pencil. Touches his ear once, with one finger.     
  
“I know,” she says. “I’m only telling you because you can’t hear me.”  
  
He nods. Then, after a brief pause, he says something in return. She doesn’t need to hear the words to know it’s something secret. Something he would never say to anyone else.  
  
They sit in silence for the rest of the afternoon, and neither of them looks away.

 

++

 

The next day the door to the attic is locked.  
  
Joanna drops her schoolbag to the floor and rattles the doorknob with both hands, twisting it hard to the right and to the left, hoping to shake something loose. She’s about to slam her shoulder against the frame when her gran emerges from a room down the corridor, her eyebrows raised high. “Problem?”       
             
“Harry’s locked it,” Joanna says, a little breathless. “Gran, can I have the key? I left a book up there, and I need it for school.”  
  
Gran smiles, shaking her head. “Such a better liar than your poor sister. I’m so proud.” She walks closer, the polished tip of her cane clicking against the floorboards. “Harry didn’t lock the door, my dear – I did. Which means you’ll need more than a key to open it again.”  
  
Joanna’s grip tightens on the doorknob. “Gran, I—”  
  
“No,” Gran says, her face set like weathered stone. “I’ve given you time enough, Joanna. We’ve much to do, and we are none of us getting any younger.” She points her cane to the staircase. “Kitchen. Now.”  
  
Three long flights of stairs later Joanna sits at the kitchen table, her hands folded on the worn wood. She stares straight ahead, refusing to meet Gran’s eyes. “Why did you lock the door?”  
  
“Because it was the easiest way to keep you out,” Gran says.  
  
“Why—”  
  
“You know why. Don’t ask foolish questions.” Gran takes the recipe book from the shelf above the oven and sets it on the table in front of her. “You read my book without my permission.”  
  
Joanna swallows. She knows Gran is only guessing; she could lie, if she wanted. “Yes,” she says. “I wanted to know about the mirror.”  
  
Gran sits in the chair beside hers, sighing as she eases the weight off her bad leg. She leans forward, drawing the handle of her cane along the table’s edge. “You could’ve asked me, you know. It is my mirror; I know it better than most.”  
  
Joanna looks down at her hands. “I was afraid you’d tell me not to use it.”  
  
“That would have been the sensible response, yes.” She rubs idly at the stiffness in her knee. For a long moment she doesn’t say anything at all. “Whatever you saw in the mirror, it must be important to you.”  
  
“It is,” Joanna says around the cold lump at the back of her throat. “Very important.” She looks up and meets her grandmother’s steady blue gaze. “Will you unlock the door?”  
  
“I won’t,” Gran says. “But you will, when you’re ready.” She pushes the recipe book into Joanna’s hands. “Open it.”    
  
The first page is a recipe for a simple dark wheat bread. Gran taps it with one thin finger, and Joanna frowns. “Bread?”     
  
“That’s lesson one.”  
  
Joanna can’t help it; her heart starts to beat a little faster. “What’s lesson two?”  
  
“Good bread,” Gran says, and points her towards the flour.

 

++

 

Some days Joanna thinks the only reason Gran is teaching her anything at all is so she’ll have someone to weed the garden.  
  
“Oh, stop whinging,” Gran says, and takes another sip of her tomato juice. She watches Joanna work from her lawn chair at the edge of the herb garden, sheltered by the shade of the stunted hawthorn tree. “These are the basics, girl. You can’t learn to use them until you know how to grow them.”  
  
The sun is warm overhead, and sweat trickles down Joanna’s neck, past her collar. “I’ve never raised a chicken, but I still know how to fry an egg.”  
  
“Don’t give me ideas,” Gran says sternly, but Joanna can see she’s hiding a smile.  
  
It’s the first true day of spring, and as she works Joanna feels something thaw inside her, a knot slowly loosening. She likes the way the soil crumbles under her fingers, dark and warm and maybe a little familiar, in an unfamiliar sort of way. She likes the heat of the sun on her back and the ground beneath her knees.  
  
She doesn’t much like the weeds, but that only adds to her sense of satisfaction when she pulls each one up by the roots.       
  
In a week or so the plot will be ready and the weather warm enough, and they’ll sow the first seeds of the year’s garden. Joanna’s never had a garden before, never wanted so much as a potted plant, but now she feels a solid sort of contentment at the thought of a summer spent outside, tending to growing things.    
  
Gran taps her shoulder lightly with the end of her cane. “Meadowsweet.”  
  
“ _Filipendula ulmaria_ ,” Joanna says, sure of her answer but stumbling a little over the pronunciation. “Queen of the Meadow, or Bridewort. Used to treat stomachaches, diarrhoea, and the pains of first love’s heartbreak.”  
  
“Good,” Gran says. “Yarrow.”  
  
“ _Achillea millefolium._ Used to treat pain, inflammation, and bleeding wounds. Not as good as borage for courage, but better than mugwort for protection of a home.” She looks up, her fingers still buried in the soil. “Rosemary for memory, comfrey for knitting bone, cinquefoil for strength, asphodel for the dead. I know these, Gran. You don’t have to keep testing me.”   
  
Gran clicks her tongue disapprovingly. “You’ve memorised them – that’s hardly the same as knowing them.”  
  
Joanna rips a weed free with rather more than the necessary amount of violence and tosses it into the growing pile. “Why aren’t you teaching Harry? She’s older.”  
  
“She is. Probably cleverer too, in her way.” Gran tips back her head, looking up into the blue depth of the sky. “But it would be a wasted effort. Your sister, Joanna, lives in the world as it is.”  
  
Joanna sits back on her heels, frowning. “So do I.”  
  
Gran smiles her most annoyingly cryptic smile. “No, my dear. Not quite.”    
  
Joanna can’t decide whether she should be offended or pleased; she settles for tearing another fistful of spiny-leafed weeds from their grip in the dirt.  
  
The house towers above them, dust-filmed windows glinting in the sunlight. It had frightened Joanna, when she was small – the size and the silence of it. The way it made her father frown and her mother’s eyes go distant and sad. Before the accident her visits to the house had been rare, and brief.  
  
Just below the highest eave of the house is a small window, round and fixed with red and yellow-stained glass. It’s blacked out on the other side, she knows, keeping the room cool and dark, but even so she finds she can almost picture the colour and shape of the sunlight as it streams across the attic floor. As it catches the silvered glass of the mirror.

Sometimes she wonders how long he’ll wait before he stops looking for her in his reflection, just out of the corner of his eye.

She tugs free the last weed in the plot and lifts it in the air. Its fine roots tickle her wrist. “It is done, milady. I’ve slain the weed-beast.”  

Gran pushes herself out of her chair, leaning heavily on her cane. “I suppose you want a reward of some kind, then.”

“Suppose I do.”

Gran smiles. “How do you feel about sandwiches?”

Joanna stands, brushing the dark soil from her trousers. There’s dirt embedded deep in the places over her knees, but she doesn’t find that she particularly minds. “I’m always in favour of sandwiches,” she says, and turns to go into the house.

“Hold on, my dear,” Gran says. “You’ve forgot a step.”

When she turns back, her grandmother is taking her worn leather sewing kit from her cardigan pocket. She opens it and holds up a long silver sewing needle, pinched between her thumb and forefinger. “Best do it now,” she says. “Give things time to settle before we plant.”

Joanna takes an unconscious step toward her, her fingers twitching. “Can I?”

Gran doesn’t frown, but a new line furrows between her eyebrows. “You’re too young. Next year, maybe.”

Joanna licks her lips, trying not to look as desperate as she suddenly feels. “It’s my garden, isn’t it? And you said nothing that grows will work properly for me unless I do it all myself.” She holds out her hand. “Please, Gran?”

“I despise rational arguments,” Gran says. “They make it perfectly impossible to reach any sort of sensible decision.” She drops the silver needle into Joanna’s open palm. “Don’t get ambitious. I’m not carrying you into the house if you swoon.”

Joanna has never swooned in her life, not even when she was nine and broke her arm falling off a climbing frame; she doesn’t intend to start now. She steps into the centre of the herb plot, remembering to stand with her feet a steady shoulder-width apart. She looks down at her trainers. “Should I be barefoot?”

“Doesn’t make much difference, I’ve found.” She thumps her cane once against the ground. “Get on with it, girl. The sun’s in my eyes, and I want a cup of tea.”

“Right,” Joanna says, under her breath. She takes the silver needle in her right hand, pinched between her thumb and forefinger, and holds her left out over the ground. Then she takes a deep, sun-warmed breath and stabs the needle into the centre of her palm.

Blood wells red and stinging beneath the needle’s point, and as she pulls it free she turns her wrist and lets the first drops of her blood fall to the waiting earth.

She’s never felt anything like it. She thinks of the moment just before she’d fallen from that climbing frame, when she’d climbed higher than she ever had before and the rush of it had taken her like a fever, a blissful, visceral vertigo. She’d felt as if she’d left her body behind on the ground and become something entirely new – something boundless and untouchable and breathlessly _alive_.

The memory of that moment is nothing compared to this.

When Joanna comes to, she’s lying flat on her back in the middle of the plot, giggling. Gran stands over her. “Idiot child,” she says. “You were meant to prick your _thumb_.”

Joanna beams up at her. “But I need my thumb, Gran. I use it for thumb-things.” To illustrate she wiggles the digit in question, ignoring the sting of pain in her palm. “See? Thumb-tastic.”     
  
Gran rolls her eyes toward the sky, as if asking it for patience or mercy or a conveniently timed lightning bolt. Joanna starts to giggle again; her grandmother is hilarious. “I most certainly am not,” Gran says, peevish. “And be careful of the thyme as you get up – your little stunt woke some of the perennials.”

Sure enough, as she pushes herself unsteadily to her feet she sees a few seedlings of thyme and what might be yarrow sprouting up from the dark soil. They’re delicate and green and perfect – the first things she’s ever grown.    
  
She grins stupidly at them. “If I gave them my blood every day, we’d have a full-grown garden within a week.”  
   
“And a lovely little corpse to use for fertiliser,” Gran says. She seizes Joanna’s wrist in strong, bone-thin fingers and turns her hand over, showing her the still bleeding wound in her palm. “This sort of power does not come cheaply, Joanna. It is not a toy, and it is not a game. You will use it wisely or not at all. Do you understand?”

Joanna nods, her euphoria gone. “Yes, Gran. I understand.”  
  
“Good.” She gives Joanna’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Let’s get you a plaster for that hand, shall we?”

“And sandwiches,” Joanna says. “With crisps, if we have them. All of a sudden I’m _starving_.”

“Oh, to be young again,” Gran says, her voice full of false sweetness. “You might be stupid, but at least you’re resilient.” She claps Joanna on the back. “Go inside and wash that hand. I’ll catch you up.”

Joanna clambers up the stone steps to the house, but she pauses just before she goes inside. She turns back to meet her grandmother’s sun-narrowed eyes. “Gran, do you think it’ll be a long time before I learn how to unlock the attic door?”

Gran’s face goes a little blank – shuttered, like Harry’s. Sad, like her mother’s before she died. “No, my dear,” she says. “I don’t think it will be very long at all.”

Joanna goes inside and cleans the blood and dirt from her hands, wishing she hadn’t asked.

 

++

 

The night after they sow the first seeds in her grandmother’s garden, the dreams start.

They continue through the summer, lush and green and quiet in a way her dreams have never been before. When she sleeps she finds herself in forests, in rain-soaked jungles, in an ill-tended garden on the grounds of a dark-windowed manor. She knows she’s searching for something; she doesn’t know what.

“You’re wasting your time,” says the boy in a high, posh voice she’s never heard. The manor garden has twisted, grown a labyrinth’s walls and a labyrinth’s silence. It towers high above them. The boy folds his arms across his narrow chest. “Only children look for things that aren’t really there.” 

“You look for me,” Joanna says. “You must, or I’d never see you at all.”

The boy’s jaw tenses, his face a careful blank. “I was a child then,” he says. “I’m not anymore.” He turns and disappears into the maze.

In some dreams she tries to follow him. In others she looks only for an exit, an escape from the narrow garden paths and the flat, summer-blue sky overhead. She grows used to wandering alone, in sunlight and in the shade. She never finds what she’s looking for.  

In June Harry moves her things to the slightly shabbier bedroom across the hall. Joanna talks in her sleep, she says, and it keeps her awake at night.

When Joanna asks what she talks about, Harry pretends not to hear the question. 

 

++

 

The night before the first autumn frost, she dreams of the boy sitting at the desk in his bedroom, bent over a book.

She’s never seen the room all at once before; she’d only ever caught bits and pieces, glimpses given by the shifting angles of the mirror. It’s larger than she thought, and messier. The light of his desk lamp warms the long lines of his face, casting his shadow on the wall beyond. 

A broken mirror lies on the floor at his feet, its frame surrounded by a circle of shattered glass. Joanna stands behind him, her hands tucked in the pockets of her dressing gown.

“That’s seven years bad luck,” she says. “Fourteen if you did it on purpose.”

He stills, a subtle tension in his back and shoulders that disappears a moment later. “Of course I did it on purpose,” he says. “I used a hammer.” He turns in his chair and fixes her with cool, unreadable eyes. “I don’t want you here. Not while I’m awake, and not while I’m dreaming. I don’t know how to make that any clearer.”

Joanna bends down and picks up a broken shard of glass. Holds it to the light. “You think I went away because of the secret you told me.” She turns the glass until she can see his reflection in it. “Which is silly, because you also think you’ve made me up in your head.” 

He plucks the glass from her fingers. “I am not _silly_.”

“You are,” she says. “A bit.” She sits on the edge of his bed, pulling her legs up and hugging them to her chest. “I didn’t mean to go away, you know. I didn’t have a choice.” 

He scowls. “I really don’t care.”

“And I really don’t believe you,” she says, hurt making the words sound sharper than she means them. “I’ve seen how lonely you are.”  

The boy stands, unfurling gracefully from his chair. He’s taller than she is now; if she were standing, she’d only come up to his chin. He walks to the bed and leans over her, his face just above her own. “I’m afraid you haven’t been paying attention,” he says, his voice smooth and touched by the cold certainty in his smile. “I only ever tolerated your presence for the sake of the puzzle you presented. Now that I’m certain you aren’t real, these little visits have become nothing more than an egregious waste of my time.”

Joanna meets the emptiness in his eyes without flinching. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do.” He presses the shard of mirror into the palm of her hand, closing her fingers around it. It bites into her skin, drawing blood, and power rises bitter at the back of her throat. “I never want to see you again,” he says. “I want to forget I ever saw you at all.”

Sometimes, her grandmother has said, in the simplest, strongest of magics that’s all that’s required – a sacrifice and an intent. Her blood, and his words. _I want to forget_.

Joanna wakes alone in her bedroom, cradling her bleeding hand to her chest.

She doesn’t dream about the boy again.

 

++

 

Even in summer, the sky over her grandmother’s house is rarely clear enough to see the stars.

“Light pollution,” Gran calls from the kitchen, raising her voice so Joanna can hear her outside on the garden steps. “You’re wasting your time.”

Joanna squints at one of the crumpled corners of her star chart, trying to decide if a glyph is meant to be Jupiter’s thunderbolt or Ceres’ scythe. Or an inkblot. She looks up at the sky again. “I’d see more if you put out the kitchen light.”

“You wouldn’t,” Gran says, but the light blinks out a moment later. Joanna switches on her pocket torch and listens to her grandmother’s footsteps behind her. The soft click of her cane on stone steps. “Astrology is rubbish.” 

Joanna smiles. “You say the same thing about antibiotics.”

“Yes,” Gran says, “and I’m right about that, too.” 

Joanna circles the glyph with her pencil. Definitely Ceres – the hooky bit on the top is all wrong for Jupiter. “People have looked to the stars for guidance throughout human history, Gran. I’m just trying to follow in their footsteps.”

“You’re trying to get out of doing the washing up.”

Joanna tips her head back, far enough that she can see the fuzzy grey expanse of Gran’s cardigan and the displeased set of her chin. “Gran, I know you don’t approve of divination—”

“I’m not stopping you, am I? Just giving my opinion.” She nudges the base of Joanna’s spine with her cane. “Though I suppose you’re too ‘mature’ now to need an old woman’s advice.” 

Joanna looks down at her chart, her shoulders slightly hunched. “You know Harry didn’t mean it like that.”

“She most certainly did.” Gran shifts to the side and walks past her, limping down the garden steps. She inhales, breathing in the fading warmth of the night air and the bittersweet smell of growing herbs. The shadow of the hawthorn tree sways behind her in the dark. “Guidance throughout human history, was it?”

“Yes,” Joanna says, tapping the end of her pencil against a squiggly blur that might be Scorpio. “I read it in one of your books.”

“I got rid of all that nonsense years ago.”  

“No, you just hid it. Not very well, either.” She frowns at the slow roll of clouds on the horizon. “Maybe I should switch to reading palms. Or tea leaves. Something less dependent on the weather.”

“Joanna,” Gran says, sounding tired, “what is it, exactly, that you’re looking for?”

Joanna tucks the pencil behind her ear and closes the star chart, folding it into neat squares. “I just think it would be useful, knowing the future. Is that so odd?”    

Gran looks up then, a quick, unconscious glance at the dark shape of the house above, the gable of the attic sharp against the sky. “No,” she says. “It isn’t odd at all.” She holds out her hand for the chart. Joanna gives it to her. “There will be many things I choose not to teach you. Once you leave this house you can read all the tea leaves in China if you like, but until then—”

Joanna stands. “Yes, Gran. I understand.” She turns stiffly to go back into the kitchen, but Gran stops her with a gentle hand on her arm.    

“The future will take care of itself, my dear. It always does.”

“Yes, Gran,” Joanna says again, and leaves her grandmother standing alone beneath the city-lit sky.

 

++

 

Joanna’s fourth herb garden sleeps under frost when her grandmother sits her down at the kitchen table and says, “Lesson number fifty-seven: Nothing can bring back the dead.”

Joanna rests her chin on her hand and nods. “Except for CPR,” she says. “And sometimes defibrillators.”

“Smart arse.” Gran reaches into her grocery sack and takes out a cardboard shoebox. She sets it on the table between them. “Open it.”

Joanna lifts the lid and sees a dead starling lying on the bottom of the box, its delicate feet curled and stiff. “Gran, you—”

“I found it in the wood. I want you to bring it back.” 

Joanna looks up from the box and meets her grandmother’s eyes. “You’ve just told me that’s impossible.”

“I know,” she says. “Try anyway.”

The recipe book isn’t much help. At its back there are pages headed with the somewhat promising _To Forestall Death_ ; the list of ingredients has been scratched out and revised many times, and the paper is mottled dark by stains. The final note at the bottom of the last page reads, _Thus far, results undesirable._

“It’s a place to start, anyway,” Joanna says to the empty kitchen. The dead starling stares up at her with eyes as bright as glass.    

On the first day, Joanna takes a piece of white chalk and writes sigils in the four corners of the kitchen table, drawing each line carefully over the pitted surface of the wood. The first charm she builds is simple – yarrow for the blood, peppermint for invigoration of the tissues. Crushed eggshell for rebirth. She grinds them to dust with her grandmother’s pestle and sews the powder into a delicate, thin-woven bag. She feeds the bag gently down the bird’s throat, pushing it forward with a long silver needle.

It doesn’t work, but she didn’t expect it to. She wipes the sigils clean and starts again. 

On the second day, she walks home from the butcher’s with a paper sack of bones and a jar of blood. She splits the bones open for their marrow and soaks long strips of linen in blood. She makes poultices and tinctures and salves, peels lines of bark from living trees and burns fires of hawthorn and asphodel. She sits awake until dawn, surrounded by research, filling pages with notes in her cramped, neat writing.

The starling lies dead in its box, tucked away in the fridge between the eggs and the milk. The sickly sweet smell of its decay follows her from room to room, clinging to her hair and hands.

On the third day, she catches a mouse in one of the live traps on the third floor. She carries it downstairs and stands in the open door to the garden, watching the frozen clouds of her breath. The rise of the moon over the houses and the evening sky.

“You understand, then,” Gran says from the hall behind her. “How it can be done.”

Joanna gently tips the mouse into her hand. It’s stunned – too frightened to bite, or even to wriggle free from her careful grip. She feels the delicate, electric hum of its living body, its heartbeat pulsing against the palm of her hand. There is potential in its weight, and the slightest of possibilities – one heartbeat in exchange for another. A death for a life.

“Yes,” Joanna says. “I understand.” She crouches down and sets the mouse on the stone steps. It sniffs the air, its small nose quivering, and then disappears into the winter-brown garden. She stands again, slipping her hands into her pockets. “Was that my lesson? That every spell has its price?”

“Perhaps,” Gran says.

Joanna is silent for a long moment. “Would it have worked?”

“Can’t say. I’ve never tried.” She turns away, her cane clicking against the floor as she walks. “Come along, then. A little bird told me there’s a rotting corpse in the refrigerator with your name on it.”

Joanna buries the starling in the garden, beneath the hawthorn tree.

She keeps her notes.

 

++

 

Joanna’s revising for her A-levels when Gran decides she’s ready to die. 

She tells them over dinner. Harry comes up from her flat in Westminster, steps through the front door in a cloud of cigarette smoke and subtle perfume and gives her sister a false, jarring smile. “Hello, darling,” she says, because she calls everyone _darling_ now, for no reason at all. It makes Joanna want to tread on her toes. “I had the most horrendous drive here. I forgot what a maze these streets can be.” She drops her coat into Joanna’s arms. “So what does the old bag want now?”

Dinner that night is quiet, the conversation stilted. Harry eats most of the asparagus, though she knows it’s Joanna’s favourite, and their grandmother hardly touches her food.

“Is something wrong with the roast, Gran?” Joanna asks. “Did I use too much dill?”  

“No, my dear, it’s lovely,” Gran says, patting her hand. “I just don’t have much of an appetite tonight – it’s the cancer, I expect. Inconvenient timing, but the roast will keep.”

Joanna stares at her. Harry stops mid-chew. “Gran,” Harry says, sounding properly herself for the first time in years, “was that meant to be some sort of joke?”

“Not really,” Gran says. She tips her head to one side. “Why? Was it funny?”

The fight lasts for hours. _Yes_ , Gran has seen doctors; _no_ , she isn’t interested in treatment. _Yes_ , the disease is terminal; _yes_ , it will be soon. Harry watches the battle from the sidelines, curled at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. Joanna shakes with rage, her fists clenched as she paces the tile.

“And what about pain management?” she asks. “If you won’t stay in hospital and you won’t let me hire a nurse, what am I meant to do when it gets bad, Gran? Draw up another decoction of willow bark and put a fucking knife under the bed to _cut the pain?_ ”

“Don’t be absurd,” Gran says. “That only works during childbirth.”

“I,” Joanna says through her teeth, “am _not_ the one being absurd.”

“What if it were one of us, Gran?” Harry says, in what Joanna privately refers to as her very-reasonable-barrister voice. “What if Joanna or I were ill, and we refused to do what the doctors told us? You would drag us to hospital by our hair.”

Gran slaps her cane hard against the leg of the table, and Harry jumps. “I am not _ill_ , child – I am dying. I am old and I am tired and I have chosen my time, and there is nothing either of you idiots can say or do that will change my mind.”

Joanna slumps to the floor, her back against the kitchen counter. Her knees hugged to her chest. “I’ll never forgive you for this,” she says, the words catching at the back of her throat. “Not ever, not even for a moment. Not for the rest of my life.”

Gran watches her carefully, blue eyes sharp. “That may be true, or it may not. Either way, it will make no particular difference to me.”

“Because you’ll be dead.”

“Yes.” She leans forward on her cane, her fingers folded around the handle. “Your parents died young, Joanna, and so you think all death is unfair. It isn’t.” The corner of her mouth twitches in something like a smile. “That, I think, is the last lesson I have to teach you.”

Joanna feels it like an ache at first, a strange pressure building behind her eyes and her teeth. It spreads along her skin, a prickling flush of adrenaline and heat and _potential_ , and then the foundation of the house shudders beneath her. Harry screeches, grabbing hold of the table, and the tremors shake the pots from their hooks, the cups and bowls from their shelves. The lamp swings wildly from the ceiling, ceramic and glass shattering across the floor, and then Gran reaches out and pokes Joanna hard in the shoulder with the end of her cane. Everything goes still. 

“That’s quite enough of that,” Gran says. “This poor house has troubles enough without you sending it into some sort of childish tantrum.” She bangs her cane against the wall. “You’ll have woken all the woodworms.”  

Joanna can’t help it; she drops her head back against the kitchen counter and starts to laugh. After a moment Gran joins in, the sound low and hoarse and rare.

“Bloody hell,” Harry says to the kitchen table. “I need a _drink_.”

That only makes them laugh harder.

 

++

 

It’s half past three on a Thursday afternoon when a strange man knocks on the front door of the house.

“Don’t answer,” Gran says from her armchair. She’s sitting beside the second floor sitting room fireplace, swaddled in blankets and shivering with a marrow-deep cold Joanna cannot feel. “He’s only here to sell you some rubbish thing we don’t need.”

Joanna pushes the window drape aside and looks down at the stranger again. She can’t remember the last time anyone but the postman came to the house; there’s almost something surreal in the sight of him, just standing there. Waiting. “If he’s a salesman, he isn’t a very good one. He isn’t carrying a case.”

“I bet he has pamphlets,” Gran says. “I bet he visits all the little old ladies and tries to save their sweet little pensioner souls before they croak.”

“He’d be wasting his time with you, then,” Joanna says. “I’ll just pop down and tell him so, shall I?” She’s out of the room and down the stairs before Gran can answer. The stranger knocks again, just as she reaches the hall, and his arm is still raised when she opens the door.

The stranger is a fair, stiff-backed man in a long camelhair coat. The sky is bright behind him, a peerless autumn blue. Joanna squints into the light, but the details of his face are lost to shadow. He lowers his arm and studies her silently for a long moment.

“You’re the granddaughter,” he says. “The second one. Joanna.” His voice is low, cultured despite the gravel in it. He looks past her, at the empty darkness of the front hall. “I’ve come to speak to Helene.”

Helene is her grandmother’s name, though Joanna’s never heard anyone call her by it before. Coming from this man, Joanna isn’t sure she likes it. Her eyes are adjusting to the daylight, and she can see the grey at the stranger’s temples and the deep lines of his face, lines that speak more of pain than of age. “Gran’s meant to be resting today,” Joanna says, “but I’ll let her know you’re here.” She steps back, opening the door further. “You can wait inside, if you like.”

The stranger steps forward, then hesitates. The threshold between them is the same timeworn oak as the doorframe, but now the dark whorls of the grain are seeping together, bleeding through the wood like ink spilled across an empty page. The darkness spreads from the threshold to the front step, a living shadow painted across the stone, and as it grows it reaches for the stranger with two straining, long-fingered hands. The stranger stumbles backwards, off the step and into sunlight, and the darkness recedes as quickly as it had come. The threshold lies between them, once again a simple, foot worn plank of wood.

“On second thought,” Joanna says, “why don’t you wait out here?”

The stranger is breathing fast, his fists clenched at his sides. He climbs again to the front step, watching her with careful eyes. “You didn’t know that would happen.” 

She shrugs. The adrenaline has made her muscles feel lovely and loose; she could stare him down all day. “The postman’s never complained about it, no.”

He frowns, and the lines around his mouth and eyes deepen. “I thought the years might have softened her. I was a fool.” He reaches into the inside breast pocket of his coat and takes out a crisp white envelope. “Give her this. I’ll wait for her reply.”

Joanna looks at the letter, then back at the stranger’s face. “She’ll want to know who it’s from.”

His jaw tenses. “Sebastian. Tell her it’s from Sebastian.”

She reaches out with a steady hand and takes the letter. “Nice to meet you, Sebastian,” she says, and closes the door behind her.

When she turns around, her grandmother is standing at the top of the narrow staircase, leaning heavily on the railing. Her face is dangerously pale. “Give that to me,” she says, her voice as sharp as Joanna’s ever heard it. “ _Now_ , girl. Give it here.”

Joanna rushes up the stairs. “Gran, you’ll overexert yourself. If you’re not careful—”

Gran snatches the letter from Joanna’s hand and fixes her with a piercing stare. “What did he say to you?”

“Gran, please—” Joanna tries to take her arm, to lead her back to the sitting room, but Gran shrugs her off.

“You were going to let him in the house. What did he tell you?” 

“He didn’t tell me anything. He asked to see you, I invited him inside, and the house tried to eat him. That was the full extent of the conversation.” Joanna moves closer, covering the frail hand on the railing with her own. “Gran, what’s going on? Who is he?”

“A prodigal pain in my arse,” Gran says, and lets go of the railing just long enough to rip open the envelope. The letter is a single, sharply folded piece of white paper, and though Gran holds the page so Joanna can’t see it, there are places where the words bleed through – places where the stranger leant hard on the pen as he wrote.

Joanna can catch only random phrases, reading backwards and through the paper. _After your death_ , _the bloodline,_ and _potential wasted_. A short smudge of ink and the name _James,_ just after the word _life._    

“I suppose he’s waiting for a reply,” Gran says, her eyes still on the letter, her voice horribly calm. She crumples the paper in her fist and holds it out over the railing, cupped in the palm of her hand. “This will have to do.”

Fire swallows her grandmother’s arm from elbow to fingertips, a pale, unnatural flame that spirals high in the air over her open hand and turns the letter to ash within seconds. Then the ashes themselves burn away, and the fire is gone. Gran’s arm falls to her side, and Joanna barely manages to catch her before she slumps to the floor, exhausted.

“That’s it,” Joanna groans, pulling her upright. “You never get to call me an idiot again. Not after a stunt like that.” She helps her grandmother through the sitting room door and onto the nearest sofa. “You couldn’t just rip it to pieces or throw in it the fireplace like a normal person, could you? You had to be _dramatic_.”

Gran lies back on the sofa and draws a hand over her closed eyes. She’s still shaking. “I was sending a message. I wanted—” Joanna holds a cup of lukewarm tea to her lips, and she takes a reluctant sip. “I wanted to make myself clear.”

Joanna sets the cup down on the table and sits back on her heels. “You’re not going to tell me who he is, are you?”

Gran smiles, a thin press of lips that hides none of her pain. “Such a clever girl.” She pauses, then adds: “In your own way.”

“Stop it,” Joanna says. “I’m blushing.” Her grandmother’s blankets lie discarded on the floor. Joanna gathers them up and covers her again, tucking the edges in close around her. Gran lies still, unresisting, and Joanna can’t quite stop herself from finding the pulse at her wrist, or watching the shallow rise of each breath as she sleeps.    

A memory rises, unbidden, of the dead starling and its terrible stillness. A memory of the mouse quivering in the palm of her hand, its heartbeat and breath. _Every spell has its price_ , she’d said, and her grandmother hadn’t disagreed.

The starling’s bones are still buried in the garden, beneath the hawthorn tree. 

Joanna rises and goes to the window, pushing the drape aside. Outside she sees a peerless blue sky and the empty front step. The stranger is gone.

She wishes she’d thought to ask his name.

 

++

 

Gran dies three months later.

Joanna’s fingers are stained with oils and salves, with willow and blackseed and betony.  She sits by her grandmother’s bed, the recipe book open in her lap.

She turns the page. “Have you ever actually _tried_ to cure someone of baldness?” 

“Nothing wrong,” Gran says, “with a bald man. Always found it attractive, myself. A little extra shine.” Her voice is faint, but steady. The elixir has eased the worst of the pain. It never lasts for long. “The stories I could tell you, child. How your ears would burn.”

“Oh god,” Joanna says. “Can we skip this stretch of memory lane, please? I still haven’t recovered from Harry’s birds and the bees speech; I don’t know if my sex drive can withstand further trauma.”

“Prude.”

“I am not.” She holds the glass as Gran takes a sip of water. “Just because I’m not an exhibitionist lesbian or a sex-crazed octogenarian with a baldness fetish—”

“I left the house to your sister.” 

Joanna sets the glass back on the nightstand. “I know,” she says.

“It’s always meant to go to the eldest, but that isn’t the only reason.” Gran looks up at the ceiling. At the cracked lines of the plaster. “Your mother hated this house. She married your father to escape it. But you – if I give it to you, you’ll stay.” She stops, hard-won breath hissing through her teeth. “I don’t want to trap you here. Not any more than I already have.”

Joanna takes her hand. “You haven’t trapped me, Gran.”

Gran laughs, low and pained. “Foolish girl. Of course I have.” She squeezes Joanna’s hand. “The book is yours. The mirror too, if you want it.”

“The mirror?” Joanna asks, frowning. There’s a cracked antique mirror over her grandmother’s armoire that might be worth something if the glass were replaced; still, she can’t imagine why she’d— “Oh,” she says. Gran’s hand slips from her suddenly loose fingers. “The mirror in the attic.”

“You forgot.”

“No, I just—” She closes her eyes and sees the boy’s face. “I never learnt how to unlock the door.”

Gran snorts. “Ridiculous. There isn’t a door in this house,” she says, “that wouldn’t open for you the moment you asked.”

Her eyes open. “But—”

“Go try it if you don’t believe me.” Gran settles back against the pillows, her hands folded over her stomach. “I’ll wait.”

“But Gran—”

“I’m not dying tonight, child; I’m in far too sour a mood. Death himself would hesitate to cross me while I’m in a mood like this.”

Joanna takes her hand again. “Maybe,” she says. “But I like you best when you’re at your sourest.”

“Masochist.”

“Grump.” The recipe book lies open on her lap, open to its last pages. _To Restore the Dead_ , it says, notes written in her own neat hand. She closes the book and drops it to the floor. It makes a soft sound as it lands. “I’ll stay here, if you don’t mind. The mirror can wait.”

“Not forever,” Gran says, but she doesn’t mention it again.

She falls asleep a few hours later. By morning, she’s gone.

 

++

 

Joanna lives alone in the house until she begins her first term at Barts.

Harry phones exactly once every two days to check in. Their conversations are short and cover little more than the weather and injustices perpetrated by Harry’s rather close-minded neighbours. Joanna’s always relieved when the time comes to say their goodbyes.

She spends her days in silence, cleaning. She starts in the cellar and works her way up room by room, sorting and scrubbing and clearing away decades worth of cobwebs and dust. She boxes away books and photos and endless stacks of well-worn records, finds a locked steamer trunk full of neatly folded men’s suits and seven warp-weighted looms crowded in a third floor bedroom, hidden beneath sheets.

She cleans every window in every room and oils the hinges of every door. The house grows unfamiliar under her hands, a stranger in the sunlight. She comes to miss the taste of dust.

At the end, only the attic is left.

Late afternoon sun streams into the corridor, painting the floorboards. Joanna stands in front of the attic door and, for the first time in years, tries the knob. It’s locked.

“Maybe it’s for the best,” she says to no one, her voice cracking a little with disuse. “I’m not a child anymore either.”

The door eases open under her hand.

The attic is just as she’d left it years before – her sleeping bag lying rumpled and unfurled, the space around littered with shabby sofa pillows and the stubs of broken pencils. The blacked out window and the silvered glass of the mirror, unmarred by dust or time. She sits on the floor, legs folded neatly beneath her, and watches her reflection from the corner of her eye.

“I’ve come to say goodbye,” she says some hours later, after the heat of the afternoon has faded from the attic air. She smiles, feeling a little foolish, and shakes her head. “I’m not sure why I thought this would work. It’s stupid, but I thought – maybe you still looked sometimes, even if you couldn’t remember why. But you live in the world as it is, and I—” She stops. Looks down at her hands and traces the small scars that line her open palm. “I think it’s time that I live there, too.” 

She sleeps in the attic that night, curled inside the too-small sleeping bag. She wakes once in the early hours of the morning, half-asleep and breathing warm into the cold; as she rolls onto her side she sees a man’s face in the mirror, his lips slightly parted as he watches her with wide, opiate-dark eyes.  

When she looks again, he’s gone. _Only a dream_ , she thinks, and by morning it’s forgotten.

 

++

   

Harry’s car idles on the street outside, and Joanna winces when her sister leans on the horn.

“I’m coming!” Joanna shouts, pounding down the stairs after her final check on each dark lamp and locked window. She looks into the kitchen – windows shut, oven off, refrigerator emptied – and then flicks off the light. Her suitcase is by the door; she carries it in her right hand, and locks the door to her grandmother’s house behind her with her left.

“Fuck,” Harry says – a typical sort of greeting, these days. She’s leaning back against the driver’s side door, her eyes on Joanna’s suitcase. “Is that really all you’re keeping?” Harry’s dressed for summer, in a loose blouse and a soft, knee-length skirt – Joanna feels dull and stiff by comparison. Then a sharp gust of wind rattles through the trees, and Harry leaps back into the car, shivering. Joanna lifts her suitcase into the boot and tries not to smirk.

“I have what I need,” she says, and drops down into the passenger seat. She buckles her safety belt and looks at her sister, at her slim face and wild hair framed by the rising dark of the house. “You don’t miss it here at all, do you?”

Harry grins. “I don’t,” she says. “And you won’t either.” She slams the gearshift into drive, and Joanna turns to watch as the house fades from sight.

She leaves the mirror and her grandmother’s book behind. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

After the war, her dreams are always the same.

“It really can help, you know,” Thompson says, tapping her pen idly against the edge of her notepad. “Talking about them.”

Joanna rather envies Thompson’s soothing, carefully neutral tone – hers has always been quite good, but Thompson’s is of another class altogether. There’s some inescapable thread of calm in her low-pitched therapist’s voice that makes Joanna _want_ to respond to her questions, no matter how invasive.

If she had answers, maybe she would.

The handle of her cane has warmed beneath her white-knuckled grip; she relaxes her fingers, one by one. “I was shot,” Joanna says. “Sometimes I dream about it. Sometimes, after I dream about it, I come here and tell you how it made me feel.” She raises her trembling left hand. “I talk about it. It isn’t helping.”

Thompson is unfazed. “You understand that healing takes time, Joanna.”

Joanna chuckles, looking away. There’s little humour in the sound. “Well, then,” she says, “I suppose it’s a good thing I’ve plenty to spare.”

There’s a silence. Thompson makes a note – _Stress, exhaustion aggravates tremor. Avoiding sleep to avoid dreams of traumatic event?_ She looks up again. “Joanna, why did you join the army?”

No one has ever asked the question quite so simply before. It throws her off balance for a moment, and she frowns. “We’ve discussed that already, haven’t we?”

“No,” Thompson says, undeterred. “We haven’t.”

The first time Joanna fired a gun, she was twenty-four years old. Her grandmother had been dead for six years, and her sister a drunk for two. The man she was seeing – a surgeon with a surgeon’s vanity who, while not technically one of her instructors, was close enough to raise eyebrows – had surprised her with a trip to his shooting club.  She’d refused at first _(you’re meant to teach me to patch up bullet wounds, Philip, not create them)_ but he was persuasive and she was still young enough to be persuaded, so when he stood her in front of the target and gave her the gun, Joanna raised it and fired.

 _Beginner’s luck_ , Philip called it. She quickly proved him wrong.

Not long after, she threw over the surgeon and joined his club. They were happy to have her.

“Joanna,” Thompson says, not for the first time. “What were you thinking of just now?”

She shrugs, ignoring the twinge in her shoulder. “Nothing important.”

“You were smiling.”

“Yes. Well.” She tries a smirk. “I am still capable, you know.”

She must look ghastly – Thompson’s gaze flicks down to the notepad in her lap. “You haven’t answered my question.”

Joanna stretches her fingers over the handle of her cane, watching the bend and flex of her knuckles. Her fingernails are growing too long; she needs to clip them. “I like being useful.”

“You were a talented surgeon. You could have been of use here.” Joanna looks away, and Thompson leans forward, persistent. “It wasn’t enough for you. Why not?”

Her temper lives too close beneath the surface, these days. Joanna clenches her jaw, keeping silent until she’s sure she can speak without being unkind. “I’d rather not talk about that today,” she says. “If you don’t mind.”

Thompson sits back in her chair. “Of course.” She writes something on her notepad, but Joanna doesn’t bother to read it. When Thompson looks up again, her expression is perfectly composed. “So,” she says. “How’s your blog going?”

Joanna thinks of the blinking cursor and the empty page. Of her gun, lying loaded at the bottom of a drawer.

She forces a smile.

 

++

 

The next day her sister is waiting for her when she leaves the physiotherapist’s office. Harry’s eyes are hidden behind sunglasses, despite the winter clouds overhead; she has a large Burberry shopping bag in one hand and her mobile phone in the other. “I’m buying you lunch,” she says. “Don’t try to argue.”

Joanna’s shoulder is a knot of pain, and her leg is little better. She leans heavily against her cane and sighs. “Harry—”

“You’ve been avoiding me for weeks, Jo – you’ve left me no choice. I’m kidnapping you and feeding you at least one meal that isn’t served freeze-dried in a packet.” She drops her mobile into the handbag over her shoulder and snakes her arm through Joanna’s, leaning close to take some of her weight. “Come on. It isn’t far.”   

Joanna tugs her arm free. “ _Christ_ , I can still walk by myself. I don’t need—”

“Don’t need what?” Harry bites out. “A crutch?”

Joanna looks away. “Harry—”

“If you’re so fucking independent, I suppose you can do without this.” She snatches the cane out of Joanna’s hand and walks off, weaving her way into the crowd of pedestrians passing by.

There is nothing wrong with Joanna’s leg – nothing at all, aside from the fact that whenever she tries to walk, it won’t bloody _work_. It is somehow the worst of the many ways her body has betrayed her since her return to London. Her shoulder will heal in time, but she is helpless against the vagaries of her own mind. She closes her eyes, listening as her breath hitches through her teeth, and takes a step forward.  
  
Harry catches her just as the leg buckles, one wiry arm looped around Joanna’s waist. “Sorry,” she says, pressing the cane back into Joanna’s hand. “I just – fuck. I’m sorry, Jo.”  
  
Joanna clutches the cane’s handle, breathing through the humiliation and pain. “Make it up to me,” she says. “Buy me lunch.”  
  
“Well, if you insist,” Harry says, still sounding a little shaken. She walks at half her normal pace as she leads the way to the restaurant.  
  
It’s absurdly posh, of course, though not quite as bad as Joanna expected – the menus are bound in leather, but the daily specials are written in chalk on a sign above the bar. Joanna chooses the cheapest pasta on the menu. Harry orders the soup and a glass of red wine. When it arrives she takes a neat sip, sets the glass on the table again and says, “I’ve left Clara.”  
  
Joanna closes her eyes, briefly. “When?”  
  
“Last night.” She takes another delicate sip of her drink – not her first of the day, then. Possibly not even her second. “It was a preemptive strike. She’s been threatening to leave for months; I just beat her to it.”  
  
“I can’t really imagine Clara threatening anyone with anything,” Joanna says. Harry’s hands are steady, her face perfectly smooth. Joanna wonders what her eyes look like behind the sunglasses. “Are you all right?”  
  
“I’m gorgeous,” Harry says. “I’m single for the first time in a decade, my sister’s home from her suicide mission in a desert hell, and my weekly Pilates has done simply _amazing_ things for my arse. I’m fan-bloody-tastic, is what I am.” She spreads her napkin across her lap and says, “Now eat your pasta. You look like a fucking skeleton.”

 _I feel like a fucking skeleton_ , Joanna thinks, and forces down her first bite of pasta.

The sauce sticks a bit at the back of her throat. It’s richer than she’s used to, heavy and sweet. They eat in silence as the restaurant moves around them, humming with the afternoon rush. When they’ve finished, Harry pays before Joanna can reach for her wallet. “Don’t even think about it,” she says, passing her card to the waiter. “I know exactly how skint you are.”

“London isn’t cheap.”

Harry gives her a bright smile. “Which is why you should move into Gran’s until you get back on your feet.” She glances at the cane, and her smile dims. “So to speak.”

“We’ve talked about this, Harry. You have tenants—”

“So I’ll kick them out.” She leans across the table, her thin face suddenly serious. “The house should’ve been yours all along, Jo, and you know it. If you won’t leme give you a percentage of the rent—”

“ _Enough_.” Joanna doesn’t raise her voice, but she’s never needed to – not when she uses this particular tone. Its effect is dramatic and immediate. Harry’s mouth closes with an audible click of teeth, and Joanna sighs into the silence. “I know you’re worried, Harry, but I’m sorting this out on my own. End of story, end of conversation.”

Harry sits back in her chair, scowling, and for a moment looks about fourteen years old. “That’s cheating, and you know it. Using Gran’s voodoo voice tricks – it’s a rotten way to win an argument.”

Joanna rubs her hand over her eyes. “That wasn’t – I don’t do that sort of thing anymore, Harry. I haven’t for a long time.” She looks up. “And don’t call it _voodoo_. It makes you sound like a moron.”

“Well, excuse me, Miss Glinda. For some reason no one ever bothered to fill me in on the proper terminology.” Harry heaves her handbag into her lap and pulls out her mobile. She slaps it onto the table between them. “Take it. It’s 2010; no one uses a landline anymore.” She stands, folding her coat over one arm. “You know, if you end up dying in a gutter somewhere I’m going to be terribly annoyed.”

“I probably won’t be too chuffed either,” Joanna says, but Harry’s already walking to the door, her sunglasses glinting in the milky afternoon light. She pretends not to hear.

The Burberry shopping bag is still sitting beside Harry’s empty chair. Joanna reaches for it, ready to limp after her, but she stops when she sees what’s inside.

In the bag she finds her grandmother’s leather sewing case, her wooden cane, and the recipe book. A yellow Post-It clings to the cardboard cover of the book, just over the tall, robed woman’s worn face. _Found these in the house_ , it says. _I thought you might want them, now that you’re home._

“Right,” Joanna says softly, to herself. “Home.”

She closes the bag.

 

++

 

She’s known Sherlock Holmes for little more than twenty-four hours when she kills for him the first time.

“Doesn’t seem to have affected your appetite much,” he says, just before shovelling an enormous bite of sweet and sour pork into his mouth. She’s hardly surprised that he goes without during cases, if he eats like this between. He takes a drink of water, and she watches the muscles of his long throat move as he swallows. An answering heat stirs low in her stomach, and it’s entirely, wonderfully absurd, like everything else about him – like everything in her life since the moment she set foot inside his flat.

Joanna tries very hard not to laugh. If she starts again, she might not stop. “Well, now you know,” she says. “Your new flatmate is a cold-blooded killer. Shoots a deranged cabbie one minute, devours a double order of beef with broccoli the next.” She leans forward, her arms folded on the table. “And so you ask yourself: what fresh terrors lie beneath her mild-mannered exterior? What _will_ she do next?”

Sherlock grins as if she’s said something perfectly delightful. There’s a bit of bok choy stuck in his teeth. “On the contrary – I know exactly what you’ll do next.”

“Oh? Enlighten me.”

He leans close over the table, his fingers steepled in front of him. “The adrenaline high you’re riding now will dissipate in approximately fifteen minutes. The crash will hit you particularly hard, given how little you’ve slept in the past few weeks and the frankly outrageous amount of food you’ve just eaten. You’ll come back to the flat and sleep on the bare mattress in the upstairs room for no less than five hours, more likely six or seven. When you come downstairs in the late morning I’ll be in the midst of my current experiment, and though you aren’t easily put off by such things you will begin to question the wisdom of sharing digs with a man who makes a habit of scrambling human eyes on his stovetop. You’ll move in anyway, though, because you feel at once indebted to me and personally responsible for my well being – irrational, but a typical enough reaction in someone of your pedantically moral bent. Over time, however, this sense of obligation will erode under the strain of my selfish, eccentric, and increasingly antagonistic demands on your patience and time, and once you’ve found some outside source of stability – either in the form of steady employment or a romantic relationship – you will leave Baker Street for good.” He sits back in his chair and gives her a close-lipped, self-satisfied smile. “It shouldn’t take more than two months. Three, if you’re feeling unusually stubborn.”

“Wow,” Joanna says after a brief, stunned silence. “That was...thorough.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She looks down at her plate, picks up a piece of broccoli with her chopsticks, and flings it neatly at Sherlock’s face. It bounces off his forehead and lands in his lap.

He blinks at her, a brown smudge of sauce between his eyes. “That, I imagine, was an attempt to make some sort of point.”

She nods. “I don’t claim to be the most mysterious of potential flatmates, Sherlock, but I’m a bit more psychologically complex than you give me credit for.” She passes him a clean napkin. “Even dull people can be unpredictable.”  

His lips twitch. “I’ll keep that in mind.” He wipes the sauce from his face, wincing slightly. “I think I’ve got broccoli in my eye.”

“You do not.”

“I do, and it _stings_.” He stands a little, bending across the table and pulling at his eyelid. “Look,” he says, “you’ve blinded me with a bud of broccoli.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Joanna says, but she can’t help but lean close to look. “I don’t see—”

A wet slice of sweet and sour pork slithers past her collar and into her shirt, and she shrieks a bit, before she can stop herself. The half-drunk couple at the next table turn and stare; Sherlock is already back in his seat, picking at his food and looking disturbingly angelic. “Problem?”

“Not at all,” she says, and flicks a clump of rice into his hair.

The waitress kicks them out before they have time to do much damage, and they stumble out onto the street, breathless with laughter. Sherlock slouches elegantly against a lamppost, smirking as she tries to shake the bit of pork free from inside her top. It involves an embarrassing amount of hopping on her part, and he starts to snicker.

“Oh, shut up,” she says. “You have oyster sauce on your face.”

He reaches out and plucks a leaf of bok choy from the hair behind her ear. He holds it up to the light, studying the green-edged glow of its veins. “It bothers you more than you let on. Killing.”

Joanna stills. Looks up and meets his eyes, their colour ethereally pale in the streetlight. “Of course,” she says. “Of course it does.”

“But you’ve killed before.”

“Twice. Both times to defend a patient from an immediate threat.” She looks away, easing her weight off her leg. Her fingers twitch, reaching for the cane she no longer needs to carry. She forces a chuckle. “You were right about one thing – I’m definitely about to crash. Mind if I kip on the sofa for a few hours?” 

“It’s as much your sofa as mine.” Sherlock tugs sharply at the hem of her jumper, and the slice of sweet and sour pork drops to the pavement with a soft splat. He steps back, his hands slipping into his pockets. “Joanna Watson,” he says, as if trying out the sound of it. “You’re more of a mystery than you think.”

She smiles. “Probably not for long,” she says, and follows him back to their flat.

 

++

 

Joanna learns quickly that the surest way to draw Sherlock’s attention to a thing is to hide it.

Her Browning is easy – she isn’t hiding it from _him_ , and she doesn’t bother to try. It fits nicely beneath a loose floorboard in the upstairs bedroom, along with two boxes of ammunition and a rather passive aggressive note reminding him of the basics of gun safety and maintenance. She keeps her journal in the locked drawer of her nightstand, knowing full well that he’ll read it the first chance he gets. She hasn’t written in it since she returned to England, and most of it is irrelevant nonsense, dry recitations of the daily minutia of war. She figures if he sticks it out through that, he’s earned the right to the few secrets buried amidst the drivel.

The trouble lies in the things she genuinely wishes to hide.

The sewing kit is the least suspicious item of the three. It’s old and many times repaired, an heirloom with a practical use. Joanna cleans the silver sewing needles, replaces a nearly empty spool of black thread, and tucks the kit away in the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink – a perfectly natural place to keep such a thing. If Sherlock ever gives the sewing kit so much as a second thought, he never mentions it.

Her grandmother’s cane, on the other hand, was bound to draw his attention. She hasn’t lived in Baker Street a week when she comes home from the shops to find him perched on the back of her armchair, balancing it between two long fingers.

“This,” he drawls, “is a fascinating piece.”

 _A fascinating piece of what?_ she wants to ask. Instead she sets the shopping down on the worktop with a clatter. “Is it?”

He huffs. “You know it is. You wouldn’t have left it out for me to find, otherwise.” He steps off the armchair and down to the floor. “Yew is an unusual wood for a cane. Not unheard of, but irregular and therefore significant.” He curves his fingers beneath the handle and lets it swing before him in the air. “It was hand carved for its original owner no less than forty years ago. Expertly made and tailored exactly to the owner’s tastes and needs – simple, sturdy, hardwearing. Elegant yet utilitarian. It belonged to your grandfather.”   

Joanna smiles.

“Oh, _hell_. Your grandmother, then.” Sherlock scowls and sits down hard in one of the kitchen chairs. “She would’ve been tall for a woman. I hardly could have predicted that, given your own considerably below-average height.”

“I’m not that short.”

“You really are.” He raises the cane in front of him, the dark wood splitting his long features in two. His eyes cross a bit as he studies it. “Like you, she carried it with her non-dominant hand to support the leg on the same side – her right. She remained active late into her life despite her infirmity, as is obvious from the soil stains on the lower third of the stem and repeated denting from a high set of stairs.” He looks up, his focus shifting to her with a sudden, exacting intensity. “You must have lived with her for some time. You have a tendency to overstep when climbing a staircase, as if you unconsciously expect a higher riser – a habit common in those who’ve grown accustomed to old houses with tall, narrow stairways.”

Joanna nods. When she’s sure of her voice, she says, “My parents died when I was twelve. I lived with her until I left for university.” She sits in the chair beside his, slipping the cane from his suddenly loose grip. “But then, you already knew that.”

He looks away, avoiding her eyes. “Mycroft sent me a file the morning you moved in. I didn’t read it.”

“You hardly needed to. I’m sure there’s something in the way I butter my toast or clean my teeth or tie my bloody shoelaces that gives me away. As far as you’re concerned, I may as well have the word _orphan_ stamped on my forehead in red ink.”

“It’s an automatic process,” Sherlock says, his voice deliberately cool. “My mind can’t help but draw conclusions from the data presented by your appearance and behaviour; it’s not something I can control. I thought you understood that.”

Her fingers are clenched around the cane. “I do.”

He meets her eyes, watching her without the slightest flicker of emotion. “Then why are you angry?”

 _I’m not_ , she wants to say, but she feels the futility of the lie before she can so much as open her mouth. She looks down at the cane – the garden stains on the stem and the marks left by years of climbing the same tall staircase. She hasn’t been inside the house in years, and Sherlock sees her still trying to climb its steps. “How did you know about my parents?”

He hesitates, but only for a moment. “Small things, mostly. There are indications in your relationship with your sister, the way you dress, your independent habits – particularly concerning money. And then there’s your hair, of course.”

She reaches for the long plait hanging low over her shoulder. “My hair?”

“A decidedly old-fashioned style, one rarely worn by women of your age. Short hair would better fit your limited interest in the more time consuming aspects of personal grooming, but instead you grow it long – unusually long, and despite its relative health and thickness you never wear it loose. Every morning you wash, comb, and plait your hair, and every evening you plait it again before going to sleep. It’s more ritual than habit, and one you’ve kept for a very long time.” He pauses. “Since the day your mother was no longer able to do it for you, I imagine.”  

For a moment she feels cracked open and exposed, as if she’s found herself suddenly naked in front of him. His face is impassive, unreadable, and there’s nothing like judgment or pity in his eyes. She looks back, laid bare, and wonders at the part of her that wants to show him more.

She holds out the cane, and he takes it.

“Short hair is just as much trouble as long, sometimes,” she says. “Or so I’ve been told.”

It’s subtle, but she sees some of the tension bleed from the still muscles of his shoulders. “Perhaps, but you’d take less time in the shower if you cut it.” 

She stands and begins to put away the shopping. “Sherlock, even if I only spent _half_ the time primping in front of the bathroom mirror that you do—”

“I do not _primp_. As I’ve explained before, I’ve a number of sensitive experiments that require—”

“What?” she says, grinning at him over her shoulder. “A rigorous skin care regimen?”  

At that Sherlock launches into an irate and excruciatingly detailed account of the various flora and fungi in the cabinet above the bathroom sink that require his constant attention, an account which continues uninterrupted as Joanna passes him the items that belong in the higher kitchen cabinets. When she blocks out the words and only listens to the drawling rise and fall of his voice, it’s almost soothing.

“Honestly,” he says, dropping a bag of sugar beside the empty jam jars on the top shelf, “when one takes into consideration your dismal observational skills and the compulsive nature of your ever-burgeoning adrenaline addiction, it really is a wonder that you’ve survived as long as you have. I commend you.”

Joanna closes the cabinet doors. “Coming from you, that’s perilously close to a compliment. I’m flattered.”

Sherlock snorts. “Don’t be.”

She elbows him gently away from the sink and turns on the tap. “I’m making soup and sandwiches for dinner. You eating today?”

“No.” He pauses, considering. “Maybe. Soup from a tin or—”

“Not your housekeeper, _dear_ ,” Joanna says in her very best Mrs. Hudson. “Nor, for that matter, am I your wife, mother, or personal chef.”

Sherlock grins. “Homemade, then. Excellent.” He leans over her shoulder as she washes her hands, speaking close in her ear. “Without onions, if you don’t mind. I find them gastronomically distracting.” He gives her shoulder a pat. “There’s a good girl.”

She raises a wet hand and flicks water at him, laughing when he recoils from the spray like a startled cat. Some things, she thinks, will just never get old. She shuts off the tap and dries her hands on the cleanest tea towel. “Pass me that recipe book, would you? The one with the cardboard cover.”

Still scowling, Sherlock shakes the last drops of water from his hair and slips the recipe book neatly from its place between her tattered copy of _The Physiology of Taste_ and his _Alkaloids and Molecular Methods of Plant Analysis_. He drops it onto the worktop. “Also your grandmother’s, I see.” He frowns at the worn cover, tracing the blurred silhouette of the woman pictured there. Her cornucopia and her scythe.

Joanna waits, careful not to hold her breath.

Sherlock’s teeth worry absently at his lower lip. “You’re very sentimental about her things.”

“Am I?”

“Yes. For a person not sentimental about much else.” He gives her the recipe book, shifting its weight into her hands. “My mother died when I was sixteen.” 

Joanna holds the book to her chest. “I’m sorry,” she says. 

Sherlock meets her eyes evenly. “Yes,” he says. “So was I.” He turns and leaves the kitchen. A moment later, she hears the click as he opens his violin case.

She prepares dinner quietly, careful of the clatter of pots and chipped ceramic plates as she waits for him to take up the violin and play. She expects plucking or screeches or, if she’s lucky, the random, indecipherable snatches of melody that will haunt her for days. She waits, but tonight there’s nothing.   

She listens anyway.

 

++

 

The next morning Joanna limps downstairs to find her grandmother’s cane mounted by hooks to the wall above the sitting room fireplace, just below the mirror. When she looks closer, she sees that the cane’s been polished, the yew wood gleaming almost red in the morning light. The skull grins widely at her, and she grins back.

“‘The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree,’” she tells it, “‘are of equal duration.’”

“Ugh,” Sherlock groans from the sofa, hidden beneath a blanket of books and open files. “ _Eliot_.”

“Yes,” she says. “Eliot.” She crosses to the sofa and lifts an empty file folder from his face. It has the words _Metropolitan Police: Confidential_ printed on it in large, forbidding letters. “Tea?”

He blinks up at her, squinting in the light. “Tea,” he agrees, his voice rough from lack of sleep. “And silence.”

“Long night?” He fixes her with a bleary sort of glare. “Right, sorry,” she says in an exaggerated whisper. “Tea. _Silence_.”

“Insufferable woman,” Sherlock murmurs, and rolls over until his face is squashed against the back of the sofa. She has a sudden, inexplicable urge to reach down and ruffle his hair. “If you do,” he says, somewhat nasally, “I shall bite you.”

“If you bite me, you won’t get any tea.” She drops the file folder back over his head and retreats to the kitchen. The dishes from yesterday’s dinner are still piled in the sink, and the equipment on the table seems to have spawned an ominous number of new experiments in the night. Her grandmother’s book sits alone on the worktop, open to a recipe for beef broth. Just as she’d left it the night before – hidden in plain sight.

Joanna slips it back onto its shelf, fitting it neatly between her books and his.

 

++

 

Thompson looks up from her notepad, pen dangling between her fingers. For all her careful neutrality, she seems less than pleased. “Joanna,” she says, “do you consider yourself a lonely person?”

Joanna frowns. “Is this about Sherlock?”

“This is about you,” Thompson says. “Though we can talk about Sherlock, if you like.” She rests her chin on her open palm, a posture of deliberate interest. It’s more irritating than it should be. “Has sharing a flat made you feel less isolated from – what did you call it – the ‘real world’? Life after the war?”

“The war was real.”     

“I never said it wasn’t.” Thompson watches her for a long moment. “You had a lonely childhood.”

Joanna takes a deep breath. The fingers of her right hand clench around a cane she no longer carries. “I had Harry.”

“You’ve told me that you haven’t been close with your sister since you were small. Since your parents’ deaths.” Thompson leans forward slightly in her chair, and the silver charms on her bracelet catch the light from the office window. The two of the charms touch, and the sound is like a bell chime. “Your grandmother took you in after the accident, is that right?”

Joanna nods.

“You never mention her.”

“She died when I was eighteen.” Thompson’s never worn the bracelet before, not during one of their sessions, but it isn’t new. An heirloom maybe, or rediscovered favourite – Sherlock would know which, and a thousand other things besides. “I don’t remember much about my childhood.”

Thompson makes a note, the bracelet chiming with each sway of her wrist. Head still bent over the paper, she says, “Joanna, did your grandmother walk with a limp?”

The anger is sudden, immediate. A bile at the back of her teeth. “Yes.”

“Which leg?”

“You know which leg.” 

Thompson sits back, her hands folded in her lap. The bracelet stills. “Sherlock can’t cure you, Joanna, not completely. I think you know that.” She gives Joanna a small, encouraging, infuriating smile. _Let me help you_ , the smile says, and rage clenches like a living fist in Joanna’s chest. “Tell me one thing you remember about your grandmother.”

“I remember that she didn’t believe in therapy.”

“Joanna,” Thompson says. Her tone is scolding, familiar, and something in Joanna breaks.

“I remember that when she was sick – when she was dying, and she lost three stone in as many months and the pain was so terrible she couldn’t eat or sleep or stand, I remember hating her for leaving me.” Joanna looks down at her lap. At the gentle tremor in her left hand. “The morning she died, I almost brought her back. I’d promised myself I never would, but she was gone and I needed her. I didn’t have anyone else.”

Joanna doesn’t need to look into Thompson’s eyes to see the pity there. “You would’ve revived her against her wishes, so you wouldn’t be left alone.”

“I would have given my life for hers,” Joanna says. “But I didn’t. I passed her last test.” She smiles, thin-lipped and strained. “I haven’t used the things she taught me since.”

Thompson looks up, at the clock on the wall. The session is over. “We should continue this next week,” she says.

“Yes,” Joanna says. “We should.”

She fires Thompson by phone the next morning.

 

++

 

In her nightmares, her gran is dying.  
  
When she wakes, she will remember the dream in pieces – distorted images and sensations filtered through the breathless pain in her chest and the hammering of the heartbeat in her ears. She will remember her grandmother’s house, the wind rattling the windows and the slow drift of sand across wooden floors. The air dry, biting cold, and her gran crying softly into weakened, weathered hands, the pain turning her into a stranger.  
  
“Surgery is still an option,” Murray says, steady at Joanna’s back. “If you can get her consent.” 

“I’ve tried,” Joanna says. “She’s a stubborn old thing.” She initials the chart and drops it into the slot at the foot of her gran’s bed. The sand is rising, spilling over their feet. Its weight is like ice through the stained fabric of her trainers. “We need to get housekeeping in here to sweep this up,” she says, her nose wrinkling. “It’s unsanitary.”  
  
“Water,” Gran says, her voice a low rasp. “Joanna, you need water.”  
  
Murray steps forward and pats Gran’s shoulder, his expression pleasantly, professionally detached. “Now, Helene, you know you can’t have anything to drink. What if we need to pull you in for surgery? Better safe than sorry, yeah?”  
  
“ _Joanna_ ,” Gran says again, but Joanna’s pager is beeping and she’s already walking to the door.  
  
“A nurse will be in soon to discuss pain management, ma’am,” she says without looking back. “We’re a bit short staffed at the moment – there is a war on, after all.”       
  
Murray follows her down the long staircase to the front hall, over the threshold and into the empty street. Harry’s car is parked nearby, its windscreen dark with a blanket of dead leaves and its tyres swallowed by sand. Joanna sighs. “She’ll need me to dig her out.”  
  
“Later,” Murray says, and she nods. They walk on, their boots loud against the pavement.  
  
Early dawn bleeds into daylight, into the sun harsh overhead, and they haven’t gone far before the street cracks, giving way to sand, to hard-packed dirt. There’s a sound like a whistle, a warning, and then they’re pinned down along an empty, endless stretch of road, sweat and sunlight bright in their eyes as they seek cover.  
  
“Shit,” Murray says at her back _(always at her back, always behind her)_ and then she sees what he’s seen – Jimenez is down, is hit, no way to reach him without presenting herself as a perfect fucking target, and she’s thinking of climbing frames and asphodel and the sweet burning sting of a sewing needle at the heart of her palm when she turns to Murray and says, “Don’t follow me.”  
  
She runs for open ground, and wakes again to hear voices on the stairs.  
  
“Absolutely not,” Sherlock is saying, and the low, infuriated rumble of his voice calms her. His voice, and the cool, slightly chemical smell of Baker Street. She sits up in bed and takes in the steadying darkness of her room. There are footsteps on the stairs. “If she wanted to talk to you, she would answer when you phoned. As she does not, we can assume she doesn’t wish to see you at any time, much less in the middle of the night, much _less_ in your current state of inebriation.”  
  
“Oh, fuck off,” Harry says, over-enunciating the way she only does when she’s truly smashed. “She’s my sister and I can talk to her anytime I like, you gigantic chinless _git_.”   

 _Oh, Harry_ , Joanna thinks, and she’s about to slip out of bed when she hears Sherlock’s reply – his voice louder now, almost careless.

“Selfish.”  
  
“What?” Harry says.  
  
“I called you selfish. I’m rather selfish myself, you see, so I recognise it easily in others.” There’s a brief silence, and movement on the stairs. “Do you know, Harriet, how rarely your sister sleeps through the night? Insomnia, nightmares, her mad flatmate with an unfortunate habit of lighting the kitchen on fire when the tedium sets in – it’s remarkable that she manages to get any sleep at all. And now you, her self-pitying drunk of a sister, making midnight visits.” Another silence. “Stay here. Don’t touch anything.”  
  
Sherlock’s footsteps are slow on the stairs, and when her bedroom door opens he leans inside, a new shape in the darkness.        
  
“I can make her leave,” he says, “if you like.”  
  
Joanna rubs her hand over her eyes. “Better not. I’m awake now, anyway.” She reaches out and clicks on her bedside lamp. Sherlock steps into the light, and his shadow stretches long behind him, out into the corridor.     
  
He’s still dressed in the shirt and trousers he wore the day before, his sleeves rolled to his elbows. When their eyes meet, his lips twitch in a rueful approximation of a smile. “Nightmare?”  
  
It isn’t really a question; you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see the sheen of sweat on her skin or the way her left hand trembles at her side. “Thank you,” Joanna says. “For trying to keep her out.”  
  
He looks behind him, at the open door. “A futile effort.”  
  
“But not an unappreciated one.”  
  
“A favour you can return when my own manipulative elder sibling next comes to call.” He takes a step back, out of the light. “I’ll send her up. Goodnight, Joanna.” 

“Goodnight,” she says, but he’s already gone.  
  
Harry stumbles into the room a moment later, barefoot. She drops a pair of sharp-heeled shoes to the floor and slumps forward onto the bed. “God,” she says, her voice muffled by the blankets beneath her. “Your flatmate is fucking _hideous_.”  
  
“He’s not,” Joanna says mildly. “At least, not all the time.”  
  
Harry rolls onto her back and gives Joanna a hard look. “Please tell me you’re not shagging him.”  
  
“I wouldn’t worry,” Joanna says. “I’m not his type. If he has a type.” She slides down until she and Harry lie side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder. For a moment they stare in silence at the ceiling, at the elephant-shaped water stain above their heads and the motes of dust floating in the lamplight. “Did you ask Clara to take you back?”  
  
Harry presses her face to Joanna’s shoulder, and after a choked silence begins to cry in wet, jerky gasps. _That’s a ‘yes’, then_ , Joanna thinks, and tucks her sister’s head beneath her chin, pulling her close. Harry’s breath smells too sweet, like sugarless chewing gum and late harvest wine. “She said she’s bad for me,” Harry says. “That she en-enables me, that she’ll always love me but she can’t be with me, like she’s been reading those fucking books again, going to those _meetings_ —”  
  
 _Good_ , Joanna thinks. _Good for Clara_. She rubs Harry’s back in small, soothing circles. “She’s just trying to do what’s best for you – she always does. The woman would set herself on fire for you, if you asked.”  
  
“I don’t want her on fire,” Harry sobs. “I just want her _with me_.”  
  
Joanna lets her cry for a bit, wondering if Sherlock can hear them downstairs. He’s been without a case for nearly two weeks, and has spent the last few days obsessively reading the classified section of every newspaper he can find, muttering about secondhand hoovers and a lost parrot. When she’d asked what he was looking for, he’d simply said, “Fan mail,” and grabbed for the next paper in the pile.  
  
Whatever it is he’s after, she hopes he gives her a little warning before it blows up in their faces.  
  
Harry’s gone quiet, and Joanna tugs her arm until she’s sitting back against the headboard. “Here,” Joanna says, offering her the glass of water she keeps on her bedside table. “Drink this.”    
  
Harry looks into the glass, her nose wrinkling. “It isn’t from the tap, is it?”  
  
“Yes,” Joanna says. “Now drink.” She slips out of bed and pulls a clean t-shirt and pair of boxers from her dresser. She tosses them at Harry’s feet. “At least one more glass of water after that, and then you’re going to sleep it off. If you still want to talk in the morning, we’ll talk.” She closes the dresser drawer, and when she turns back to the bed Harry’s staring into space, resignation dark in her red-rimmed eyes. Joanna sighs. “I’m sorry. I wish there were something I could do.”  
  
Harry raises her head. “There is,” she says. “There is something you can do.” She stands, setting the water glass on the bedside table with a clatter. “You can use Gran’s book.”    
  
Joanna leans back against the dresser, her hands clenched in fists behind her. “Harry—”

“There’s magic for this; I know there is. You don’t even have to make her love me again, just make her want to see me, make her forget—”  
  
“Harry, you don’t understand what you’re asking.”  
  
“ _You_ don’t understand what I’ve lost!” Harry cries. “How could you? You’ve never loved anyone the way I love her. You’ve never given anyone a bloody chance.” She stumbles forward, red-faced and far too close. “Saint fucking Joanna, martyr to her own perfection. All those weaker, _smaller_ people – she tries to help them, of course she does, but everyone disappoints poor Saint Jo in the end. Poor, suffering Saint Jo.”  
  
Joanna closes her eyes, her lips pressed together in a thin line. “You’re drunk.”  
  
“You’re going to end up just like Gran. Miserable and broken and alone.”  
  
“Maybe I will.” Joanna opens her eyes. “But at least I won’t end up like Dad.”  
  
Harry stares at her, mouth open. She takes a step back. “I’m not—”  
  
“No, of course not,” Joanna says before she can stop herself. “Dad never left Mum. He decided to take her with him instead.”  
  
There are footsteps on the stairs, the sound filling the silence until they come to a sudden, eloquent stop halfway to the landing. _Either keep quiet or kick her out,_ the footsteps seem to say. _Some of us are trying to work._

“Jo,” Harry says, her voice low, disjointed. She sounds as if she might cry again. “Joanna, I—”

“Drink the water. I’ll be back in a minute.” Joanna doesn’t wait to see if she’ll obey; she slips out the bedroom door and onto the landing above the stairs. The floorboards are cold beneath her bare feet.

“Sorry,” she says to the shadow standing below. “How much of that did you hear?”

“Not much,” Sherlock says. He takes another step up. “You don’t have a martyr complex.”

“I might.”

“You don’t. Clara does.”

Joanna grins down at him, though she knows he can’t see it in the darkness. “You really are very good.”

“Obviously,” he says, sounding pleased and a little off-balance, like he always does when she gives her honest opinion of his abilities. He retreats a few steps. “Ask your sister to verbally eviscerate you in a slightly less piercing tone of voice, would you? It’s distracting.”   

“I’ll see if she’s taking requests,” Joanna says, and returns to her bedroom. A moment later, she hears him descend the last of the stairs.

Harry is curled on her side in the bed, hidden by blankets and facing the wall. The water glass lies empty on the floor. Joanna picks it up and sets it carefully on the bedside table. She sits on the bed, her back against the headboard. “You ready to sleep?”

“I don’t know what’s more infuriating,” Harry says to the wall. “How awful you are when you lose your temper, or how quickly you forgive me when I lose mine.”

“We’ve had worse fights.”

“Yeah,” Harry says softly. She reaches behind her and lifts the blankets with one arm; Joanna slips beneath them, sliding down until her head meets the pillow. She looks up at the ceiling and listens to the steady sigh of her sister’s breath. “I’ve never understood why you gave it up,” Harry says.

Joanna folds her hands over her stomach. “The magic? You never understood why I liked it in the first place.”

“You liked it because it was Gran’s, and because you were the only one she’d share it with.” Harry rolls over, onto her back. Her elbow knocks sharp against Joanna’s side. “Did you ever wonder why she didn’t teach me too?”

 _Because you live in the world as it is_ , Joanna thinks, but she doesn’t say it. She’s lived in that world herself for years now, and she still doesn’t understand the difference. “I asked once,” she says. “But she didn’t really answer.”

“Of course she didn’t.” Harry closes her eyes. “I didn’t meet Gran until after you were born. She and Mum started talking again while Mum was pregnant with you, and then for a while she was around all the time.”

“Bet Dad loved that.”

Harry smiles. It isn’t a particularly pleasant expression. “She frightened him. She frightened a lot of people, you know that.”

“She never hurt anyone,” Joanna says, stung. “She wouldn’t have.”

“Maybe not,” Harry says. “But she was old when we knew her.” She props herself up on one elbow, leaning over Joanna until she can reach the bedside lamp. She switches it off, and the room goes dark. They settle into the silence, shoulder to shoulder. “When Mum and Dad died,” Harry says, “I asked Gran to bring them back. I begged her.”

Joanna swallows. “Nothing can bring back the dead.”  

“I know. That’s what she told me.” Harry’s hand finds hers in the dark. “But it’s not quite true, is it?”

Harry’s fingers are cold and heavy over hers, and Joanna remembers the dawn light through her grandmother’s bedroom window. The sound of her breath when her chest rose for the last time, and the stillness after it fell. “Is that why she didn’t teach you?” Joanna says. “Because you asked?”

Harry rolls over onto her side, facing the wall. “Go to sleep,” she says. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

They don’t.

 

++

 

“Oh, brilliant,” Donovan says when Sherlock steps out of the cab. “Because this crime scene wasn’t creepy enough.”  
  
Sherlock’s smile is empty and perfectly horrible. “Good evening, Sally. In your usual high spirits, I see.”

Donovan steps up to the tapeline, her hands buried deep in her coat pockets. She turns to look at Joanna, and the wind whips her hair into her face. She looks tired. “Doctor Watson.”

Joanna nods. “Donovan.”

“Decided to stick with the freak, then, have you?”     

 _Yes, actually,_ Joanna’s about to say, but Sherlock steps forward, his shoulders stiff. “Lestrade is expecting us.”

“Lucky him,” Donovan says, and lifts the tape. Sherlock ducks beneath it, and Donovan smirks. “Try not enjoy yourself too much, yeah? You make some of the forensic techs queasy.”

“I doubt that,” Joanna says. “If they work with Anderson, they must have strong stomachs.” She crosses under the tape. “Thank you, Sergeant.” She holds Donovan’s gaze and lets her eyes say the rest: _You’re dismissed_. Donovan scowls and walks off, her heels clicking on the pavement.

Sherlock hides his grin in the collar of his coat, but Joanna sees it anyway.

“Something funny?” she asks.

“Not particularly.” He turns his attention to the little brick house in front of them, and the crowd of police officers blocking the open door. His eyes narrow, taking in the scene. To Joanna, it looks like an aggressively normal little street lined with aggressively normal little houses. She wonders what Sherlock sees. “You do realise,” he says, “that I neither want nor need you to defend me.”

Joanna shrugs. “I wasn’t.”

“Good.” He looks at her, a glance from the corner of his eye. “Shall we?”

They walk side by side up the drive to the house and push past the officers standing on the front steps. They stop abruptly when they see the sign on the door.  
  
 _Madame Seostris_ , it says in a flowing, dramatic script. _Seer, Occultist, and Witch_. _Hours by appointment only._     
  
“Fantastic,” Sherlock says, his voice bone dry. “Not even through the front door, and already I’ve two suspects in mind.”  
  
Joanna tries to look amused. “Hansel and Gretel?”  
  
He nods, deadpan. “I blame violence on television. Corrupts young minds.” He disappears into the house, and the dark shape of his coat merges with the shadows in the hall.  
  
Joanna’s about to follow when she notices the potpourri satchel hanging below Madame Seostris’ sign. The satchel’s a drab little thing compared to the elegant script above – it’s been embroidered with a sigil of some kind, but the stitching is crooked and hastily done. A blessing, maybe, or an inscription of welcome. Not one she recognises or remembers. She leans forward to smell it and reels back, coughing.  
  
“Gone off, has it?” asks a nearby PC, steadying Joanna with a hand on her arm.       
  
She nods, tears stinging her eyes. Her throat feels raw. “You might say that.” _Or you might say it’s been stuffed full of a deadly hallucinogenic weed_ , she thinks, stepping carefully over the threshold, her eyes on the satchel. Datura is common enough, but no one sane would think it a cheery scent to add to a home decoration. Every part of the plant is poisonous, often fatally so, and it’s used only in the most desperate and dangerous of charms.  
  
There’s nothing particularly desperate or dangerous about the Madame’s empty sitting room. Heavy drapes hang over the windows, shutting out the last of the evening sun. The carpet is thick and wine-red, and it muffles the sound of Joanna’s footsteps as she walks to the small, round table in the middle of the room. The tablecloth is black, embroidered with your typical grab bag of magical signs and symbols – pentagrams and crescent moons, ankhs and runes and the occasional Ouroboros – and at its centre sits a crystal ball in an ornate silver stand.

Joanna walks to the windows and pulls back the drape. Three more satchels hang over each pane of glass, all stitched in black thread with the same sigil. She lets the curtain fall back into place.  
  
“Madame Viola Seostris,” she hears Lestrade say from a room down the hall. “Aged 57. Legal name was Eileen Farmer. Client found her this morning – the door was unlocked.”  
  
Joanna turns the corner into the kitchen, squinting into the sudden light of the crime scene lamps. Lestrade, Anderson, and Sherlock stand around a long wood dining table, staring down at the corpse posed serenely on its surface.       
  
Sherlock bends until his face hovers over the corpse’s, his expression equally serene. “You think she was murdered, then.”  
  
“No,” Anderson drawls with all his usual charm, “I think she decided mid-arrhythmia to take a quick snooze on the kitchen table.”  
  
Lestrade tucks his notepad into his coat pocket. “You have to admit, Sherlock, the body does look as if it’s been deliberately arranged.”  
  
“Hmm,” Sherlock says, the politest equivalent of _you hopeless moron_ in his vocabulary. He lifts his head and looks straight at Joanna. “Your opinion, Doctor?”  
  
Joanna walks up to the table, ignoring Anderson’s venomous glare in her direction. The kitchen lacks the theatrical atmosphere of the sitting room – the work surfaces are clean but stained with long use, and the bundles of dried herbs hanging from the low ceiling are the room’s only decoration. The table itself is old and pitted with holes, dotted by hard puddles of yellow candle wax.     
  
“Acute photosensitivity,” Sherlock says from over her shoulder. “She kept heavy shades on all her lamps, and often worked by candlelight.” He leans forward until his mouth is near her ear. “Well observed, but hardly germane to the task at hand.”  
  
Photophobia is a symptom of datura poisoning, but she’s sure he knows that. Sherlock may not be much of a herbalist, but he recognises a deadly toxin when he smells it. She smiles. “Sherlock?”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Back off.”  
  
He does, if only slightly. She turns her attention to the body.  
  
Madame Seostris was a handsome woman. Her short-cropped hair is dyed unnaturally dark, and though her skin has faded grey beneath her makeup, there’s something like life still in the strong angles of her cheekbones and chin. Her feet are bare, her trousers and blouse black, simple – expensive. Her arms are folded unnaturally across her chest, like a carving on a pharaoh’s tomb. She’s almost smiling.       
  
Joanna takes a pair of latex gloves from her coat pocket and snaps them on. Her examination of the body reveals no obvious external signs of cause of death – no blood, no bruising beyond the expected lividity, no indication of any injury whatsoever. She leans close and smells the mouth and hands. They stink of datura.  
  
Joanna has more experience with the dying than the dead, but she’s sure enough when she turns to Sherlock and says, “A toxin, most likely self-administered. Judging by rigor, I’d say time of death was between eight and eleven o’clock last night.” After moonrise.  
  
Anderson scowls. “There’s no evidence to suggest that the poison was self-administered.”  
  
Joanna plucks a pair of tweezers from a nearby tray of forensic tools and eases a sliver of green from beneath one of the fingernails on the right hand. She drops it into a plastic evidence bag. “There is now,” she says.    
  
Sherlock snaps the bag out of her hand. “ _Datura stramonium_ ,” he says, lingering over each syllable with a sort of morbid delight. “The devil’s weed. A popular hallucinogen among the desperately spiritual and terminally stupid.” He grins. “Supposedly used by the witches of medieval Europe in their dark, ecstatic rites.”    
  
Somehow Joanna manages not to roll her eyes.  
  
“Hold on,” Lestrade says, stepping forward. “Are you saying this was an accidental overdose?”  
  
Sherlock snorts. “Hardly. Datura is a powerful, agitating deliriant; her death was clearly a peaceful one, so she must have fallen comatose shortly after she ingested the toxin. Given her past recreational use of the weed, we can assume she knew the difference between an amount that would send her flying through the night on her broomstick and one that would kill her almost instantly. Her overdose was deliberate.”     
  
“That’s a lovely little story,” Anderson says, “but it doesn’t explain the position of the body, or why it’s on the bloody _kitchen table_.”  
  
Joanna has been Sherlock’s crime fighting sidekick long enough to know that this is when things devolve into pointless insults and bickering. Sure enough, Sherlock says, “Honestly, Anderson, even _you_ can’t be that dim,” and they’re off. Lestrade steps in the middle to referee, and Joanna tunes them out.  
  
If Sherlock is right, Seostris was using datura to augment both her spells and her state of mind as she cast them. This time of year, she’d almost certainly have to be growing her own, probably under a heat lamp in a garden shed behind the house – she’d have kept the datura as isolated as possible, and she never would have handled it without gloves. Unless, of course, she were about to commit suicide.  
  
Joanna looks around the kitchen, trying to ignore the creeping ache in her leg. There’s something important she’s missing. Something even Sherlock isn’t going to see.  
  
Another satchel hangs in the kitchen window, half hidden behind a bundle of lavender. _To mask the smell_ , she thinks, and she’s about to step toward it when Sherlock whirls out of the room and down the hall.  
  
“Bastard,” Anderson hisses, and stalks after him.  
  
Lestrade sighs. “Suppose that means we’re off to the garden, then.” He shoves his hands in his coat pockets and generally looks like a man desperate for a cigarette. “You coming?”  
  
“I’ll catch up.” She gives him a small half-smile, the most she can manage at the moment. “Try not to let them kill each other?”  
  
He shakes his head. “I tell you, if it weren’t for all the paperwork I’d have to wade through after—” Anderson shouts somewhere in the distance, and Lestrade sighs again. “Bloody children, the both of them,” he mutters and disappears down the hall. 

The satchel hangs high in the window over the sink, tied to the curtain rod with a bit of twine. Joanna pushes up onto her toes and reaches for it, fingers outstretched.  
  
It’s like grabbing hold of a live electrical wire. The shock slams through her arm and into her chest, and she doubles over in front of the sink, gasping. The satchel falls, landing at her feet.    
  
Her left arm is numb from shoulder to fingertips, a dead weight at her side. If she hadn’t been wearing gloves the spell almost certainly would have stopped her heart – the heart thundering now in her throat, beating out its furious rhythm against her ribs. _And the lost heart_ _stiffens and rejoices_ , she thinks, _in the lost lilac and the lost sea voices_ , but Eliot always puts Sherlock in a mood, so she doesn’t say it aloud. She starts to laugh instead.      
  
She’d forgotten magic could feel like this. It’s _marvellous_.  
  
Joanna slumps down to the floor, kitchen cabinets cool against her back, and scoops up the satchel with one finger. It swings in the air, harmless and disarmed. An empty gun.     
  
She rips open the bottom seam with her good hand and her teeth, wrinkling her nose against the smell. Datura stinks of decay, of birds rotting in shoeboxes. Sick beds and blood on sand. She reaches into the open satchel and pinches two gloved fingers through the leaves and seeds and ash until she finds the source of the spell that nearly killed her.  
  
It’s a man shaped out of clay, small enough to sit easily in the palm of her hand. Its arms are bound behind its back, its clay legs tied together with twine. _To bind an enemy_ , Joanna thinks, remembering the yellowed pages of her grandmother’s book. _To keep him from your door._  
  
She buries her fingers in the clay man’s chest and digs out a coiled slip of white paper. She unrolls it clumsily with her right hand, pressing it open against her thigh.  
  
 _Moriarty_ , it says, long letters shaped in black ink. Below the name a brown spot of dry blood stains the paper, the size of a finger prick. Joanna closes her eyes.

Only half a name. It never would have worked, not even with the blood, and Seostris knew it. She knew it wasn’t enough, and still she hung little bags of cloth and ash like lamps in the windows, to keep away the dark. To buy her the time she needed.  

The corpse on the table smiles, her arms folded across her chest like an ancient king’s, like a pharaoh’s in stone. Like someone prepared for death.

 _Who would sponsor a serial killer?_ Joanna had asked that first night, when Sherlock told her the cabbie’s story. When she first heard the name Moriarty. _Why would anyone—_

 _I’ve no idea,_ Sherlock had said, his voice low and inescapably _pleased_. That was the last they’d spoken of it.  
  
There’s a rubbish bin beneath the sink. Joanna crams the satchel and the clay man inside, below the fruit peels and used plastic wrap. _Destroying the evidence_ , she thinks, and shoves the slip of paper into her coat pocket. It hardly matters – she knows what happened, and there’s nothing the police can do. Nothing she could tell Sherlock that would make him believe.

“You know, you’ve put me in a very awkward position,” she tells Seostris’ body, and crawls under the table. Just in time, too – at the back of the house, a door slams. A single pair of footsteps rings down the corridor.  
  
“Superstitious _imbecility_ ,” Sherlock’s shoes say, storming into the kitchen. “Find a couple of chalk stars drawn on the floorboards and suddenly the Keystone Kops turn into the Brothers bloody Grimm. Of all the backward, simple-minded—” He stops abruptly. “You’re under the table.”  
  
“Really?” she says. “No wonder the ceiling’s so low.”     
  
Sherlock’s shoes step closer. “Joanna?”  
  
“Yes, Sherlock?”  
  
“Why are you under the table?”  
  
“Because,” Joanna says, “that’s where the suicide note is.”        
  
He drops into a crouch beside her. It must have started to rain; his hair is damp, and he smells like wet earth. There’s a smudge of dirt on his chin. “You’re not serious.”     
  
“There’s always something,” Joanna says, and slides over so he can join her under the table. He does, his knees tucked to his chest. They both look up.  
  
The first column burnt into the underside of the table begins with _E. Hopkins 1844_ and ends with _V. Steward 1893._ The inscriptions grow longer in the next column: _R. Steward from a weak heart 1906_ is followed by _T. Steward born small, 1910_ and _L. Steward 1910, in childbirth._ By the years of the Great War the Stewards have given way to the Scotts, the Scotts to the Barrows. _F. and S. Barrow. Air raid, 1940. E. Russell-Barrow born in excellent health, 1943. K. Farmer, from cancer of the bone. 1950._  
  
Sherlock’s fingers slide over the names as he reads, his gaze flowing from one line to the next with unsurprising speed. Joanna watches his face as he reaches the end.  
  
 _E. Farmer,_ says the last inscription. _In defiance, 2010._ The scorch marks are fresh. Joanna can still smell the burning wood.  
  
Sherlock exhales, wonder in his pale eyes. “She added her own death.”  
  
“They’ll find that she ingested the datura voluntarily during the autopsy. Until then, this is your proof.”  
  
He turns to her, his focus sudden and blistering. “You knew this would be here. How?”  
  
Harry keeps their grandmother’s kitchen table in a storage unit in Haringey. Joanna remembers sitting beneath it when she was small, tracing the burnt letters of her name. Of her mother’s. _P. Russell, born 1950_. Then, after Harry’s name and her own: _P. Watson, traffic accident. 1985._    
  
Joanna added Gran’s death the morning the ambulance left with the body. She burnt herself with the soldering iron; she still has the scar.

“I didn’t know it would be here,” she says. “I dropped my notepad, and when I bent down to pick it up, I saw the writing.” 

It sounds like the truth. Sherlock frowns, but she can tell that he believes her. He looks up at the underside of the table. “E. Farmer,” he says. “In defiance.”

Feeling has started to return to her numb arm; she’ll have to check the rest of the satchels for defensive spells before they leave, or risk one sending a Yarder into cardiac arrest. She holds her arm close and ignores the sting. “In defiance of what, do you think?” 

“There’s a barrel of ash in the garden – books and papers, judging by the remnants. She burned them just before she died.” He stares at the table like he can see through to the body above. “She was paranoid. Reclusive. Had her groceries delivered, refused to leave the house. Binned her post unopened. She hadn’t accepted a new client in two months.”  

“She was afraid of someone. Someone who wanted what was in those books.”

Sherlock looks at her, his expression strangely awkward. Almost gentle. “She was ill, Joanna. She’d stopped taking her medication.”

Of course. Only children and the mad believe in magic. She looks away, the stinging fingers of her left hand curled into a fist. “Antipsychotics?”

“Yes.” There’s a silence. “Joanna, are you—”

“What the buggering _fuck_ ,” Anderson says, “are you two doing under the corpse?”

“Your job,” Joanna says, and beside her, Sherlock starts to laugh.

 

++       

 

After that, Lestrade makes them wait outside in the rain for their taxi. Sherlock sulks at the screen of his mobile, his coat collar tugged up to his ears. Joanna watches the sky, and the grey weight of the clouds.

They’re closer now to her grandmother’s house than to Baker Street. Closer than she’s been in years.

“Why the kitchen table?” Sherlock asks suddenly. “Why not just a record book? A framed bit of paper?”

Joanna closes her eyes. “Because when someone is dying or about to be born, a sturdy, flat surface is rather more useful than a bit of paper.” 

“Ah.” He doesn’t say anything else. His mobile chimes, and she opens her eyes.

The book is caught in one of the neighbour’s hedges, not far from where they’re standing in the street. What’s left of the spine is charred black, and the front and back covers are gone. Only a few pages remain, curled in the rain, and as Joanna watches a gust of wind whips them open, revealing a picture of a woman – a woodcut printed in black ink. The woman is tall and robed, her face lifted to the sky. In one arm she holds a cornucopia overflowing; in the other, a scythe. Below her are four words printed in large, heavy letters.

 _THE LADY AGAMEDE’S ARCANA_ , Joanna reads, and a heart’s beat later the wind rips the book from the hedge and sends it into the air, tumbling down the rain-wet street.

She stands beside Sherlock on the pavement and watches it go. 


	3. Chapter 3

She returns to the flat the next afternoon to find Mycroft Holmes sitting on the sofa, wearing a pair of latex gloves and flipping casually through her grandmother’s recipe book.

“Good evening, Doctor Watson,” he says without looking up from the time-yellowed page in front of him. “Did you enjoy your walk?” 

His assistant sits at Sherlock’s desk, her legs crossed neatly at the ankle and her eyes fixed on the Blackberry in her hand. Joanna shrugs off her jacket and tosses it over the arm of the sofa. “I did, thanks.” Her voice sounds like it belongs to someone else, pleasant and impossibly steady. “I see you found something interesting to read while you waited.”

“Very interesting,” Mycroft says. His gaze lifts to meet hers. “You don’t mind, I hope?”

“Not at all. That one belonged to my maternal grandmother – she was a bit of an eccentric, bless her. Excellent cook, though.” She hides her hands in her trouser pockets. Her left is perfectly steady. “Sherlock said he’d be out for most of the night. I’ll tell him you stopped by, if he doesn’t deduce it from the mud on the doormat.”

“The position of the sofa cushions, more likely.” He looks down at the book again. “Do sit, Doctor. Your leg must be paining you.”

“My leg is fine.”

“I’m sure it is. For the moment.” He brushes his fingers across the page open in front of him. “It seems,” he says, “that quite a few men and women in your family have been ‘eccentrics’, and for a not inconsiderable number of generations.” He turns to the last pages of the book and holds it up for her to see, his gloved fingers splaying the pages wide. “And this looks very much like your own handwriting, doesn’t it, Doctor Watson?” He smiles, shark-like. “What a puzzle.”

 _To Restore the Dead_ , Joanna reads at the top of the page. Beneath that, in the same young, stiff hand, it says, _Caution: Untested._     

Joanna’s calm slips. “What do you want, Mycroft?”

“Nothing. Just a friendly chat about a common interest.” His smile expands, showing teeth. “We _are_ friends, aren’t we, Doctor Watson?”

Joanna gives him a sharp smile of her own. “The gloves are a new look for you. Planning to dust for prints?”

“A simple precaution,” Mycroft says, tapping one finger against the book’s spine. “Metaphysically-imbued items can become quite…” He pauses, rather dramatically. “ _Volatile_ when handled by strangers.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t handle them, then.”  

“Sir,” the assistant says. Her expression is smooth, her posture perfectly poised, but her eyes stare through the screen of her Blackberry as if she’s seeing something else entirely. As Joanna watches, a bead of sweat slips down the woman’s temple. Mycroft closes the recipe book and sets it on the coffee table. 

“Better?” he asks.

“Yes, sir,” the assistant says, but her voice is still strained. “I don’t believe she knows she’s doing it.”

Mycroft’s eyes narrow. “Is that possible?”

The assistant frowns, still staring through her Blackberry. “Certainly. What little magical control she once learnt she’s clearly forgotten.”  
  
“Whatever you think I’m doing, I’m not,” Joanna says. “I haven’t in years.”

Mycroft peels the gloves from his hands and drops them to the table, beside the book. “I’m sure you haven’t. At least, not intentionally.”  

“I’m going to quite intentionally boot you out of my flat in a minute if you don’t tell me why you’re here.”

Mycroft sits back against the sofa cushions, his hands folded in front of him in an eerily familiar gesture. “I understand your reticence to discuss these matters, but such circumspection is unnecessary. I already know everything you might wish to hide.” 

“I doubt that,” Joanna says.

Mycroft tips his head slightly to one side, studying her with the barest hint of genuine amusement in his cool eyes. “Your grandmother’s name was Helene Elisabeth Russell, and she was a witch. As are you, Doctor Watson, despite the lengths you’ve gone to deny it.” He turns to his assistant. “ _Witch_ is a rather charged term, politically. A more appropriate alternative?”

The corner of the assistant’s mouth twitches. “Shaman, strega, magus, or thaumaturge. Haruspex or sibyl.” She pauses. “Cunning or wise woman.” 

“Cunning woman,” Mycroft repeats, lingering on each syllable. “I quite like that, don’t you?” 

Joanna picks up the recipe book, tucking it under her arm. “Are you going to tell Sherlock?”

Mycroft’s expression turns serious. “Do you want me to?”   

“If I wanted him to know, I’d tell him myself.” She looks away, toward the clutter of books and papers on his desk. “Not that he’d believe me.”

“He might. If you were able to offer him irrefutable proof that such things are possible.”  

Joanna takes a deep breath, and the spine of the recipe book presses hard against her side. “Whatever you want to call it,” she says, “it isn’t part of my life anymore. Sherlock doesn’t need to know.”

“No,” Mycroft says slowly, as if coming to a decision. “Perhaps not.” He stands, buttoning his suit jacket. “I do so enjoy our little visits, Doctor Watson, rare though they may be.”

“I suppose I should just be glad you’ve downgraded from kidnapping to home invasion.”

“ _Sir_ ,” the assistant says through her teeth. Her face is flushed, her breath fast. Her Blackberry lies abandoned in her lap, but her eyes are still fixed on the empty air just over her clenched hands. “We really should be going.”   

“You’re ill,” Joanna says. “Let me—”

“That won’t be necessary. Her discomfort is only temporary, I assure you.” Mycroft walks to the door and opens it. He turns back, his hand on the doorknob. “You have a remarkable gift, Joanna. I hate to think it might ever be used against you.” He leaves, closing the door behind him.

“ _Fuck_ ,” the assistant breathes, profanity shaped from a sigh of relief, and then there’s a loud crack as her grandmother’s cane rips free from its place above the mantle and shrieks across the room, past Joanna and directly through the empty air where Mycroft stood just a moment before. It slams into the wall and stays there, buried inches deep and quivering. 

The assistant slumps back in her chair with a small, self-satisfied smile. “I told him you’d react badly if he touched the book. He underestimated you.”

The cane shudders, like it wants to bore through the wall and follow Mycroft out into the street. Joanna swallows. “I didn’t do that.”

“Of course not. It was the family of invisible elves who live in your fireplace. They love a good javelin toss.” The assistant pushes herself out of the chair, Blackberry clutched in one hand. “That was sarcasm, by the way. It was definitely you.”

Joanna tries to pull the cane from the wall. The wood prickles with heat, and it refuses to budge. “How do I—”

“Ask it,” the assistant says. “Nicely – you’ve worked it up into quite a state.”

Joanna grips the cane by its handle, as if shaking a stranger’s hand. “Um. If you wouldn’t mind?”

The cane falls easily from the wall, leaving behind a gaping hole. Mycroft’s assistant steps up beside her. “Think your flatmate will notice?” she asks, her face so entirely without expression that for a moment Joanna thinks she’s serious. She isn’t.

Joanna steps back from the wall, the recipe book beneath one arm and the cane under the other. “I suppose I’ll have to come up with a story.” 

“Hmm,” the assistant says, and presses her palm flat over the hole. She holds it there for a brief moment, perfectly manicured nails and pale fingers splayed across the wallpaper. When she lowers her hand, the air smells slightly of wood smoke and the hole is gone.

“Impressive,” Joanna says. 

The assistant raises an eyebrow. “Not really.” Her Blackberry chimes, and she reads its screen. Her thumbs tap across the keyboard in reply. “I’ll be leaving now,” she says, as if Joanna is somehow in her way.

“Right,” Joanna says. “Well, it was nice to see you again.”

The assistant gives her an utterly blank look. “Sorry?”  

Joanna sighs, unsurprised. “Goodnight, Anthea.” She walks over to the fireplace and returns the cane to its spot above the mantle. In the mirror she can see the assistant standing in the open doorway, watching her. “What?”

“You shouldn’t lie to him. Sherlock. Not about the magic.”  

“Did Mycroft tell you to say that?”

The assistant shakes her head and smiles, a Mona Lisa in black Manolo Blahniks. “My name isn’t Anthea,” she says, and leaves.

  

++

 

Two days later Joanna finds the listening device hidden in their sitting room.

She’s looking for the television remote when she knocks a stack of Sherlock’s papers to the floor and hears the tinkle of breaking glass. And a voice.

 _Now, Sherlock_ , the stack of paper says, sounding remarkably like Mrs. Hudson, _you know how I enjoy your playing. I’m only asking you to choose something more cheerful._

 _And by cheerful_ , a voice like Joanna’s adds, _she means something with a melody. Or actual notes._

 _Pedestrian,_ Sherlock says; Joanna can remember his sneer, the arc of the violin bow as he snapped it through the air. _Waste of my time. I play to clear my mind, not to satisfy the vacuous expectations of—_ The sound of his voice flickers, then fades entirely. But the conversation hadn’t ended there. Mrs. Hudson had told him that if he was going to act like a child, she was going to treat him like one. She’d confiscated the skull again, as well as every corrosive chemical compound in the kitchen.

Sherlock had slammed out the door minutes later in a great sulk, and Joanna hasn’t seen him since. That was three hours ago. 

The stack of paper doesn’t seem to have anything else to say. Joanna crouches beside it and shifts through the mess until she finds a battered wooden cigar box with a Post-It stuck to the top. _Soil samples,_ it says in Sherlock’s spidery handwriting. _Closed cases, 2009._

Joanna opens the box and finds something else entirely.

Through a cloud of sawdust she sees a delicate network of amber glass tubing, twisted in complex configuration around six empty amber vials plugged with cork and copper wire. The glass is warm to the touch, almost pleasant, but beneath it all there’s the sour clockwork hum of unfamiliar magic, like the weight of a penny on her tongue. It’s not like any spell she’s felt before.

The seventh vial is broken, shattered when she knocked the cigar box to the floor; she gently pulls the cork from the intact vial beside it.

 _Very well, Mycroft,_ the vial says in Sherlock’s voice, which sounds unusually weary. _What do you want me to say? That you were right and I was wrong? Well done. Congratulations. I hope you choke on it._

There’s a silence. Mycroft’s response, she assumes. She’d heard Sherlock speaking to someone on the phone last night while she was trying to sleep, but the conversation had gone on much too long to be with Mycroft – Sherlock rarely lets his brother distract him for more than thirty seconds at a time, if he answers at all. Or so she’d thought.

 _Absolutely not,_ Sherlock says, _and if you insist on interfering – oh, don’t embarrass us both by pretending otherwise. I can still see the imprint of your ever-widening arse on my sofa cushions._

Another silence, shorter this time. 

_I don’t need to know the topic of your little ‘chat’ to know you were sticking your nose in again, Mycroft. If it had been of any importance whatsoever she would have told me; I can only assume—_

Mycroft interrupts, and through the amber vial she hears Sherlock’s low growl of annoyance.

 _I trust her about as much as I despise you, which should tell you all you need to know. Goodnight, brother. Don’t call again soon._ She hears the clatter as his mobile hits the table, and then nothing.

Joanna takes a hammer from the pile of tools at the back of the hall cupboard and smashes the vials, each one quickly after the other. A jumble of voices spills out of the box – hers and Sherlock’s, Mrs. Hudson’s and Mycroft’s and others, lost in the cacophony – and she holds her hands tight over her ears and waits. When it’s done, she returns the box to the table, hiding it again beneath the stack of paper.

Sherlock’s mobile is still on the coffee table; it only takes a moment for her to type and send the text.

 _I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,_ Mycroft replies a moment later. Joanna deletes both texts, rolling her eyes.

If he’s hidden other spells in the flat, she doesn’t find them.

 

++

 

Joanna wakes in the middle of the night to see a boy at her bedroom window.

His hair is dark, his child’s face moon pale. She sees his fingertips pressed against the glass, tapping. Trying to reach her from the other side. 

 _But you can’t,_ she thinks, _not anymore,_ and she almost forms the words aloud before the dream fades and she recognises Sherlock, trapped outside on the fire escape. He’s crouched at her window, trying to free the latch.

Joanna slides out of bed, and he looks up. He nods politely. “Hello, Joanna,” he says, the depth of his voice muffled by the glass. “Enjoying your evening?”

She stands in front of the window, arms crossed over her chest. Her mouth is dry, her tongue thick with sleep. “Sherlock, is something wrong with our front door?”

“Not that I’m aware of.” He gives her the charming almost-smile he only ever uses when he wants something. It’s been a while since he’s directed it at her. “Are you going to let me in?”

She undoes the latch and opens the window. Night air prickles along her skin, her exposed arms and legs. She steps back, shivering, and he slips into the room, graceful despite his height and the narrow window. His shoes squelch as they hit the floor.

Joanna switches on her bedside lamp. “Sherlock—”

“A minor mishap,” he says, his sodden coat and trousers dripping onto the rug. “Though I turned it to my advantage in the end.” His teeth are chattering slightly, his lips almost blue. Joanna shuts the window with a definitive snap.

“You’re lucky you didn’t turn it to hypothermia,” she says. “Clothes off. I’ll get towels.”

Sherlock frowns. “Satisfaction of your neurotic nursemaid tendencies aside, that’s hardly necess—”

“Shut up and strip,” she says, and walks out of the room.

Sherlock’s pyjamas and dressing gown are in a pile on the bathroom floor. She scoops them up into her arms and grabs two of the cleanest-looking towels from their racks. When she gets back to her room, she finds Sherlock still in his shirtsleeves and trousers, his suit jacket a wet lump behind him on the floor. His coat is spread carefully across her bed, leeching muddy water into the sheets.

Sherlock’s fingers are too stiff with cold to manipulate the buttons on his shirt with any sort of accuracy. Joanna drops the towels and pyjamas onto a dryer part of her bed and steps up to help. “Fall into the Thames again, did you?”

Sherlock watches her fingers as they move briskly down his chest, opening his shirt. “No,” he says. “Koi pond.”

“Classy.” She tugs the shirt off his shoulders, and it drops to the floor with a splat. She unbuckles his belt and pulls it free. “I thought you went out to hound Dimmock about General Shan’s autopsy.”   

He nods, and then after a moment adds, “Yes. I did.” 

She undoes the button and zip on his trousers and reaches for one of the towels. “And how did that turn into a midnight dip in a koi pond?”

Sherlock blinks down at her, expressionless. His hair drips into his eyes. “What?”

“The pond, Sherlock. How did you manage that? Have they installed one at New Scotland Yard since I was last there?”

He shakes his head, as if to clear it. “No. I was – something came up. Another case. Jewel thief.”

She moves close again and tips his head down, looking into his eyes. “What’s wrong with you? Did you hit your head when you fell?”

He takes a large step back, nearly colliding with her bedside table. “No, I’m fine. My head’s – fine. Just cold.” He takes the towel and buries his face in it, scrubbing it over his hair. “Lost my keys in the water,” he says through the towel. “I didn’t want to wake Mrs. Hudson.”

Couldn’t wake her, more like. The woman sleeps like a rock. “And I suppose your mobile is ruined?”

“Of course.” His head reemerges, his hair wild, and he rubs the towel over his chest and arms. He smirks at her. “But I did catch the thief.”

“I’m sure jewels all over Britain sleep easier tonight because of you.” She frowns; he’s trying to hide it, but he’s still shivering. “Do you need help with your shoes and trousers?”   

“I need tea,” he says firmly. “Lots of it. Very hot.”    

“You need to get into dry clothes,” she says, but she pulls her dressing gown from its hook on the door and goes downstairs anyway. She’s seen Sherlock undressed before – modesty is not one of his virtues, in either sense of the word – but if he wants some privacy, she’s happy to give it to him. She’d like a little of her own, come to that.

They haven’t had time to straighten up the kitchen since the madness of the smuggling case, and there isn’t space enough on the worktop for a mug, much less the kettle. She stuffs a few things into the empty cupboards to make room and starts the tea.

Sherlock pounds down the stairs a minute later in his pyjamas, his dressing gown swirling around him like a ratty blue cape. He dumps an armful of dripping clothes into the kitchen sink. “Here, hold this,” he says, and shoves his coat into her hands. It’s sopping wet and smells vaguely of fish flakes. Sherlock begins to dig through the pockets. “I lost my favourite set of lock picks as well as my keys. I need to know what else is missing.”

“Your wallet?”

Sherlock makes a low, dismissive sound – clearly he finds fault with her priorities. “Still in my trousers. It’s fine.” He pulls out a sticky, congealed lump of what once must have been nicotine patches and drops it onto the table. He begins his attack on the coat’s inside pockets, finding in quick succession a blue biro, a round tin compact, and his pocket magnifier. He shakes the water out of the magnifier and grins. “Excellent.”

“What’s that?” Joanna asks, pointing to the compact. “Emergency rouge?”

“A mirror.” He flicks it open with his thumb. “Good, it’s intact; I’d worried the fall might’ve cracked it.”

She hangs his coat on the back of a chair. “That’s a relief,” she says. “A broken mirror is the last thing we need.” Sherlock looks up from the compact, his eyebrows raised.

“Oh?”

“Seven years bad luck, if you believe in that sort of thing.” Sherlock gives her a pitying look, and she smiles wryly. “Which of course you don’t.”

“Neither do you, really. You’re much too sensible.” It should be a compliment, but Sherlock makes _sensible_ sound like a mild but potentially embarrassing disease. He closes the compact mirror with a snap, and as he does Joanna catches a glimpse of his reflection, long face and dark hair haloed by the light overhead.

Joanna sees his reflection, and then remembers where she’s seen it before.

Memory hits her like a rush, a sudden, concussive explosion of sound and – _I never want to see you again_ , he’d said, but now he stands like a ghost in front of her, barefoot and damp and slightly flushed from the warmth of the flat, and it can’t be him. She would’ve known. 

Sherlock takes a step closer, frowning. “You’ve gone pale. Why?”

Joanna turns away, toward the sink. “It’s nothing,” she says, and starts sorting through the soggy pile of his clothes. “A twinge in my leg, is all. It’s fine.”  

“You’re lying,” he says, but he doesn’t sound sure. “Joanna—”

Her fingers clench around heavy fabric of his trouser pocket and his wallet wedged inside. “What do you need a mirror for, anyway? I’ve never seen you use it.”

“A small mirror is useful in any number of situations. I’ve always carried one.” He moves closer, a sharp-angled warmth at her back. Lingering in the periphery of her vision. “I’ve done something to make you angry. What is it?”

 _You forgot me_ , she thinks, the words pressing hard against the back of her teeth. _You left me behind_. “Nothing,” she says. “I told you, I’m fine.” She pulls the wallet free from the pocket with a sudden jerk of her arm and turns to face him. He’s standing too close; she has to tilt back her head just to see his face. His eyes go directly to the cut on her forehead – a souvenir from the smuggling case and its climatic abduction. He pushes the hair at her temple aside with the slightest touch of his fingertips, uncovering the wound. He studies it, his expression distant and analytical.

“It’s healing well,” he says. “Will it scar?”

“No. I don’t think so.” She takes a steadying breath, pinned open and exposed under his gaze. “I should go back to bed, Sherlock. I’ve work in the morning.”

His hand drops to his side, and he draws back, away from her. “Dull.”

She tosses him his wallet, and he catches it. “I certainly hope so, yes.”

Sherlock flips the wallet open, closes it, and throws it onto the worktop. He drifts to the other side of the kitchen, tying the belt of his dressing gown firmly around his waist. “I have a new case. I leave for Minsk in a few hours.”

Joanna almost laughs, though it’s not remotely funny. “Minsk?”

“I shouldn’t be long. I doubt it will be worth my time.”

“Then why are you going?”    

He stops pacing and stares at her, his eyes narrowing to slits. “You want to come with me.”

Her heart pounds unpleasantly in her chest. “I _want_ to be sure you won’t fall into a Russian fishpond and freeze to death.”

“Minsk is in Belarus.”

“Not the point, Sherlock.” She can’t look at him now without seeing the boy she knew, his too-long, too-young face and the winter afternoons spent in alone her grandmother’s attic, surrounded by schoolbooks and empty bags of crisps and his cluttered desk, just on the other side of the glass.

He was always so far away, before. It never occurred to her to wonder what she would do if she could touch.

The kettle beeps twice and shuts off. Sherlock recovers the tea bags from beneath the wobbling tower of books on the table, and she passes him a mug. “You know I couldn’t afford to go with you, even if I didn’t have a shift at the surgery.”

“I’d make the client pay.”

She looks down. His bare feet and hers, in her white cotton socks. The floor needs sweeping. “I can’t, Sherlock.” She smiles, her heart in her throat. “Anyway. It’s not as if you’ll need me.”

“No,” he says, “I don’t suppose I will.” He scoops up an armful of books from the table and holds them to his chest, tea mug clutched in his other hand. He walks out of the kitchen without another word. A moment later, she hears the soft click of his bedroom door as it closes.

Joanna’s sheets are still wet, soaked through in a muddy, coat-shaped stain, but she finds a dry corner at the far side of the bed. She spends the night curled on her side, watching the slow progress of shadows and sunrise across the wall. When she finally drifts off, it’s to the sound of his pacing footsteps in the rooms below.

When she wakes the flat is quiet, and Sherlock is gone.

  

++

 

In Joanna’s dreams, her grandmother is alive.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Gran says. She shifts in her lawn chair, the seat creaking beneath her. “I’m as dead as I’ve ever been. You don’t need to be a bloody detective to see that.” She lifts her cane and points it at the patch of weeds Joanna’s pulling up. “You’ve missed one.”

The sun is hot overhead. Joanna squints up at the sky, trying to guess the time. It’s early morning still, but soon the heat will be unbearable. She should get Gran inside.

“I’m not an invalid,” Gran says, “and you’re not my doctor.”

“I am, actually,” Joanna says. She stands, brushing the sand from her knees. She isn’t sure why she bothers; her uniform is filthy. “You’re not used to the extreme temperatures here, Gran. You need time to adjust, and you need water. If we go inside now—”

“We’re not finished with today’s lesson.” She taps her cane hard against the bare ground. “Meadowsweet.”  
  
“ _Filipendula ulmaria_ ,” Joanna says, familiar syllables slipping easily from her tongue. “Queen of the Meadow, or Bridewart. Best when used to treat stomach aches, diarrhoea, and the pains of true love’s heartbreak.”  
  
“Good,” Gran says. “Datura.”

“ _Datura stramonium_. Devil’s Weed, or Moonflower. Used as a hallucinogen or lethal toxin. Symptoms include delirium, hyperthermia, and severe sinus tachycardia; overdose can result in coma and death.”

Gran nods. “I have one more.” She leans back in her chair, fingers steepled in front of her. She smiles a stranger’s smile, wide and hollow and white as chalk. “Botulinum toxin.”

The shot slams Joanna down face first into the dirt, and she feels the force of it long before the pain. _I’m hit_ , she says, lips moving soundlessly against earth, and even through the shock some distant, reflexive part of her mind notes the fire of the penetrating bullet wound to her left shoulder, the shattered bone and warm pooling of blood. She breathes in dust.

“Nicked the subclavian artery,” Joanna says, the ground cold beneath her cheek. “She’ll bleed out in ten to fifteen without immediate attention.”    

Murray rolls her onto her back, and her vision goes white with pain. “You fucking idiot,” he gasps, terrified. “Bloody Saint Jo and her glorious _fucking_ death wish—”

“Be nice,” she says. “Dying.”

“You’re not,” he says, but he hasn’t touched her shoulder, hasn’t reached for his kit or dragged her back to cover. He kneels at her side, burying his face in his hands, and she realises that it isn’t Murray at all.

“You’re just a child,” she tells the boy. “You shouldn’t be here.”

The boy lowers his hands and looks at her, colourless eyes and pale, unreadable face. “And you should know better,” he says, in a high, posh voice she’s never heard. “By now you really should.” He touches her face, pushing the hair at her temple aside with the slightest touch of his fingertips. “There isn’t a door in this house,” Sherlock says, “that wouldn’t open for you the moment you asked.”

Joanna wakes up on the sofa in Baker Street, her breath white in the cold.

“You were having a nightmare.” Sherlock’s voice from a chair on the other side of the room. He’s watching the news with the sound off, his back to her. The pink phone sits beside him on the armrest, within easy reach of his twitching fingers. “I didn’t want to wake you – once we hear from him, it will likely be some time before your next opportunity for a nap.”

The bomber. Joanna sits up, rubbing her hand over her face. The flat is freezing, but early morning sunlight streams in through the cracks in the boarded up windows. She tugs the blanket close around her. “Did I say anything?”

“Hmm?”

“While I was dreaming, did I say anything?”

His fingers still. “I spoke to you, and you responded.” He picks up the television remote and clicks on the sound. “It was only nonsense, of course.”

“Of course,” Joanna says, and trudges off to the bathroom. She cleans her face and teeth, re-plaits her hair and changes her clothes. When she comes back downstairs, there’s footage of a bombed out block of flats on the television.

 _12 dead in gas explosion_ , the screen says, and Joanna sits in the chair beside Sherlock’s, listening to the reporter’s even-toned account of the destruction. Faulty gas main, he says. A tragic accident.

She looks at Sherlock and sees him staring down at the phone, a light like wanting in his eyes.

       

++

  

Her first thought after regaining consciousness is, _Oh hell, not again._

She doesn’t open her eyes at first – instead she feels the car moving beneath her, smells the leather seats and the subtle sting of a man’s expensive aftershave, sitting close. The Chinese smugglers had knocked her out with a blow to the head and tossed her in a van, but this is a considerably more refined operation – a jet-injected dose of a fast acting sedative to the neck and a getaway in a bloody limousine.

Joanna wishes she were dim enough to think, even for a moment, that this was Mycroft’s doing.

She opens her eyes and sees Molly Hooper’s closeted boyfriend watching her from the other seat, a bottle of spring water in one hand and a leather-bound book in the other. He smiles, close-lipped and sharp as his suit.

“Hullo, Jo,” Moriarty says, singsong. “I don’t mean to be overly personal, but you’ve got a bit of drool—” He taps his own chin, “just here.”

Her wrists and ankles are bound tight with plastic ties. She forces a smile. “Ta.”

“No trouble. Just thought you should know.” He sits back, crossing his legs at the knee, and drops the book onto the seat beside him. “I thought we’d take this opportunity to have a bit of a chat. You must have questions.”

Joanna licks her lips; her mouth tastes like dust and a lingering sourness from the sedatives. “Is Molly dead?”

His forehead furrows, and it almost looks like genuine confusion. “ _That’s_ your first question? Really?”

“Yes.” She shifts in her seat, testing the give of the plastic ties. The car windows are tinted near black, but the coloured lights of the street outside flicker as they pass, distorted and indistinguishable. “Are you going to answer it?”

He laughs, shaking his head. “Well, look at you. The girl glares daggers at your back whenever you get within three feet of him, and you still—”

“She’s alive, then.”

“ _Yes_ ,” Moriarty groans, the way Sherlock says _dull_ or _waste of my time._ “Last I saw her, she was in perfect health. Pink-cheeked and cheerful. I haven’t touched a hair on her empty little head, and I don’t particularly intend to.” He slides forward to the edge of the smooth leather seat, his knees bumping hers. “Your hair, on the other hand—”

“What did you want from Viola Seostris?”

He gives her a playfully severe look. “You’re going about this all wrong, Jo. I mean, I didn’t quite expect you to throw yourself at my feet and beg for your life, but I did hope we’d stick to some sort of script – ‘why are you doing this, you’ll never get away with this _,_ oh god help me help me please,’ _etcetera_. The classics are classics for a reason, you know.”

“I would beg for my life if I thought it would do any good,” Joanna says.    

Moriarty studies her for a long moment, eyes dark, his face stripped of any pretence of emotion. “You would beg for his life, I think. I’m not certain you would for your own.” He reaches out and touches her cheek. Two fingers, warm against her skin. “Joanna, don’t you want to know what I’m going to do with you?”

Her jaw tenses under his touch. “I’m the fifth hostage. Sherlock’s last puzzle.”

“Yes. Yes, you are.” His hand moves to her hair, the plait at the back of her neck. It settles there, a long-fingered weight against her spine. “Do you know why?”

Joanna’s fists clench behind her back, and the plastic bites into her wrists. “Seostris had something you needed, and she refused to give it to you. What was it?”

Moriarty stretches his legs, pushing himself away from her and back against his seat. He takes a long drink of water, his throat working as he swallows. He licks his lips when he’s done and holds out the bottle. “Thirsty?”

He knows she is; the sedatives have made her head pound and her throat feel like sandpaper, raw and desert dry. She swallows and feels the grind. “It was something in her books, wasn’t it? Something you wanted to know.” His grip tightens on the bottle, and Joanna grins. “I’m right, aren’t I? Seostris knew, and she killed herself to keep it from you.”   

Moriarty tips his head to one side, feigning polite curiosity. “Remind you of your dear dead gran, did she?” He smiles, showing teeth. “Oh, Joanna. How _sweet_.”

For the first time since she regained consciousness, Joanna feels the panic beneath the rising adrenaline. She refuses to call it fear – not now, with her hands and feet bound and his hungry, mocking eyes fixed on hers. She meets his gaze evenly, unflinching. “My dear dead gran would have ripped you to pieces.”

“Perhaps,” Moriarty says. “But you can’t, can you? You turned your back on it. Gave up your inheritance for a glamorous life of sand and blood and shit.” He leans toward her, his elbows resting on his knees, like an old friend inviting a confidence. “Is that why you never told Sherlock you found my name at the crime scene? Because you knew that if you told him about the magic, he’d find out how utterly _useless_ you are?”   

She grits her teeth. “Untie my hands, Mr. Moriarty, and you’ll see for yourself exactly how useless I am.”

He laughs, delighted. “Oh, much better. This is what I like to hear. You, Doctor Watson, are my most-improved hostage of the week.” He raises the bottle to her in a mock toast and downs the rest of the water. He drops the bottle to the carpeted floor, empty. “You deserve a reward, don’t you? I’ve never kept pets for long, but even I know that a good doggie gets a treat.” Moriarty takes the book from the seat beside him and opens it to a page marked by a withered silk ribbon. He spreads the book over his lap, brushing his fingers over dense lines of narrow script that turn the pages black in the low light. “All those books burned, decades worth of research and study, and the one thing she most wanted to keep from me was charmed against fire.” He looks up, a quiet smile in his eyes. “Sounds a little like fate, doesn’t it?”

“That was Seostris’ book?”

“One of them. The one I needed.” He coils the ribbon around his finger, loose at first, then tight enough to bleach the skin white. “The late Madame, while an unremarkable Seer, was quite the talented historian. Her passion was genealogy – bloodlines and inheritances.” He twists the ribbon again, and the book groans with the strain. “But magical genealogy is a difficult business, what with the secrecy and the paranoia and that tricky period last millennium when most of you were hanged or burned at the stake. Or drowned.” The ribbon rips free in a hiss of old silk. “The innocent sink, and the damned rise to the surface – that’s how it goes, isn’t it? It’s been so long since I saw a proper drowning.”

Joanna sits back against seat, wrists pinned tight between her back and the leather. “What about the boy? Carl Powers. Was that a proper drowning?”

Moriarty shrugs. “Carl sank like an innocent. But then, I did help him along in that, didn’t I?” He leans forward, Seostris’ book open in his hands. “Do you believe in fate, Doctor Watson?”

“Why would you want a book of witch genealogy?”  

“Answer the question and I’ll tell you.”

“No, you won’t.”

“No,” he says, grinning. “I probably won’t.” The pages of the book are dense with names and dates and meaningless acronyms; Moriarty tips it toward his chest and gives her a wink. “Fate or free will, Watson. What’s your call?”

Joanna grits her teeth. “Free will.” 

“I thought all witches believed in fate.”

“I’m not a witch.”

“Oh, aren’t you?” He closes the book with a snap. “Well, never mind, then. I was going to ask you to read my palm, but I suppose I won’t bother now. Killjoy.”  

The car slows and comes to a stop. There’s a knock on the window, and Moriarty slouches back in his seat.

“Yes?”

The door opens, and a man in dark fatigues and a black facemask ducks his head inside. “We have arrived at the set location, sir,” he says in crisp, slightly accented English. “Everything is in place.”

“Holmes?” Moriarty asks, all cool disinterest.

“Thirty minutes out,” the man says. It’s hard to see in the dark, but his right hand is tucked close against his body; he must be the one who grabbed for her first. Idiot. 

“Two of your fingers are dislocated,” she tells the man, leaning forward a bit to catch his eye. “If you don’t see a doctor soon, there might be permanent damage.”

Both men turn to stare at her. “Permanent damage?” the man in fatigues says, and she can see the sceptical twist of his frown even through the mask. 

“I can’t be sure without a proper examination, but it felt like I wrenched your first and second fingers fully out of joint. Is there any discolouration?”

The man glances down at his mangled hand. “The skin is blue at the knuckles, yes, but I thought—”

Moriarty pulls a flick knife from his breast pocket and opens it with a practised jerk of his wrist. In a single, smooth movement he leans down and cuts the plastic binding her ankles together. “Get the good doctor inside. If she tries to dislocate anything else, shoot her.” He opens the other door and steps out, the book tucked under his arm. The door slams shut behind him.

Joanna looks at the man in the mask. He has a SIG 9mm in his undamaged hand, and it’s trained on her. “My aim is not so good with my left,” he says, “but at this range it would make little difference, I think. You should get out of the car now.” 

It’s difficult with her hands still bound behind her back, but she manages to climb out the car door and onto the pavement. The building in front of them is squat grey concrete, nondescript and entirely unfamiliar. There’s a chipped plastic sign on the door that says _Please Use Student Entrance,_ and another just below it: _No street shoes in pool area. Thank you._

Joanna looks to the sky, the slow roll of clouds on the horizon and the rare light of the stars. If she’d looked before, she might have known. All witches believe in fate.

Joanna smiles, rueful. “‘Fear death by water,’” she says, and the man nods.     
  
“T.S. Eliot,” he says. “ _The Waste Land._ ” The door opens, and another masked man stands inside, with another gun. A corridor dark and echoing behind him. The man with the broken hand moves close behind her. “But the water is not what should frighten you,” he says, and together they take her by the shoulders and pull her into the dark. 

 

++

 

“Once upon a time,” Moriarty says through the earpiece, “there was a man who was dying, and Death came and stood outside his door.” He pauses, letting the silence fill with static. “Stop me if you’ve heard this one.” 

The pool waits on the other side of the door; Joanna can hear the low hum of the filters. The gentle sounds of water against tile. The corridor is dimly lit and cool, and the air tastes harsh, like chlorine and industrial cleaners. She takes a deep breath and feels the vest expand with her ribs, shifting beneath the weight of the Semtex. A stray wire curls loose at her side, sharp against her left breast. She closes her eyes.

“You know, your Madame Seostris used to tell me stories,” Moriarty says, his voice soft in her ear. “She knew all the good ones – cursed boxes and poisoned cups, hands of glory and the wasting rings. All the nasty little things hidden away in cellars and crypts, unwanted and forgotten. She’d tell me where to find them, and I’d pay her such a lot of money. Until that inevitable day when she found the one thing I really wanted, and then decided she didn’t want to share.” For a moment, all she hears is the hiss of his breath, deceptively close. “Joanna, do you know the story of Agamede’s Mirror?” 

Joanna shakes her head once, her eyes still closed. The sniper at the far end of the corridor must see, because Moriarty sighs in her ear a moment later. “Oh dear. I thought for sure you’d remember. I thought it would be one of your favourites.” He pauses, a brief crackle of silence. “You’ve forgotten it, I suppose. Like you’ve forgotten so many things she taught you.”      
  
Moriarty’s men unplaited her hair before dressing her in Semtex and wire, and it hangs loose around her shoulders, tangled inside the collar of the anorak and down her back. A strand has fallen into her eyes, but she can’t brush it away, not with a rifle’s red light shuddering across her chest. Her hands hang stiff at her sides.  
  
_The frailty of genius_ , Sherlock once called it. Moriarty will give her the opening she needs; she only has to wait. 

“You’re probably thinking of ways to save him,” Moriarty says, sounding amused. “I can hear that cracked little misery of a mind just crank-crank-cranking away. You’d detonate the bomb yourself if you thought you could catch me in the blast, but there’s no way to be sure, is there? Lover boy could be here now. He could be just on the other side of that wall.”

In the distance a door opens and slowly creaks shut, and Joanna hears footsteps against tile. The muted depth of Sherlock’s voice.

“He’s not here for you,” Moriarty says, low and suddenly vicious. “It isn’t _you_ he wants. I could kill you now, burn you alive and let him watch, and it would only be part of the game. He’d have his next move ready in minutes, and your ashes would be dirt under his feet.”   

Joanna opens her eyes. “Then do it.”

Moriarty laughs quietly, into her ear. “Oh, I would. But the curtain’s up, Jo, and we’ve such a show planned for him. It’s time for your entrance.” The sniper at the end of the corridor moves closer, an unsubtle, unnecessary threat; Joanna opens the door and steps through.

The room is high-ceilinged and half-lit, echoing with her footsteps and the last bell tone reverberations of Sherlock’s voice. He stands at the water’s edge, looking away, and in the moment before he turns to face her she sees his reflection.

The surface of the pool is as smooth as a mirror.


	4. Chapter 4

Joanna’s grandmother died on a clear morning in early spring, just before dawn. Joanna sat by her bed for a long time afterward, fingers pressed to the paper-soft skin at her grandmother’s wrist. Then she walked down to the kitchen, phoned for an ambulance, and went to find the soldering iron.

The floor beneath the kitchen table was cold and unswept. Joanna knelt on stiff knees, her head tipped at an awkward angle as she burned her grandmother’s name into the wood. _H. Russell_ , she wrote, just below the record of her mother’s death. _Of lung canc_

Her hand slipped, and the burning tip of the soldering iron caught the soft flesh of her thumb. She hissed and dropped the iron to the floor. She unplugged it with a jerk on the cord, but not before it scorched a small, black-edged hole in the lino.

Joanna sucked at the burn, thumb aching between her teeth, and heard the words so clearly Gran might have been standing beside her, cane tapping impatiently against the floor.

 _Do it properly, then,_ her grandmother did not say, would never say again, and Joanna burnt the rest of the inscription into the wood with the tip of one finger, smoke curling around her skin. _H. Russell. Of lung cancer, 1991._ It would be her last piece of magic for nearly twenty years.

 _J. Watson_ , she thinks as Sherlock raises the gun and aims for the explosives, his face like marble in the rippling light of the pool. _J. Watson and S. Holmes. Lost in fire, 2010._ Sherlock looks to her, a glance from the corner of his eye, and she nods.

Moriarty grins, wide and hollow and white as bone. “Fear death by water,” he says, and Sherlock fires.

 

++

 

Joanna is drowning.

She feels the hot press of acid at the back of her throat, the air-starved ache in her lungs, but she can’t fight her way to the surface, not yet – fire swells in the air above the pool, distorted by water and the creeping darkness at the edge of her vision. If she doesn’t breathe soon—

 _But the snipers_ , she thinks. _Snipers and the fire and Sherlock—_

Sherlock has slipped from her arms and is sinking limp and motionless toward the pool’s floor. He’s unconscious. A long shadow drifting in the light.

She kicks hard to the surface, sucks in a single smoke-filled breath and dives again. An arm hooked around his chest and she drags the dead weight of him up to the air, breaking the surface with a gasp. Sherlock’s head slumps forward, his hair dark in his eyes. He isn’t breathing.

It takes all her strength to pull him out of the water and onto the tile. His mouth is cold beneath hers and her breath shudders, stops _(what if a sniper fired before I got him to the water,_ she thinks, _what if he’s been hit—)_ but she finds the strong speed of his pulse and breathes again, her air in his lungs. He chokes, and his eyes open, water-pale and fixed on hers.

“You absolute prick,” she says, and rips open his suit jacket, feeling for injuries with shaking hands. “I could kill you myself.”

“I’m not shot,” he says, his voice faint. “Blacked out when—” her searching fingers find the fourth and fifth ribs on his left side and he hisses. “When we hit the water.”

She laughs, wiping the sting of chlorine from her eyes. “When I tackled you and fractured two of your ribs, you mean.”

“Bruised,” he says, “not broken.” He pushes himself up onto his elbows with a poorly hidden wince. “I’m fine. You?”

 _I thought you were dead_ , she thinks, and some small part of what she feels must show in her face, because he grabs hard for her arm, his eyes wide.

“Joanna, are you—”

“Yes, yes, I’m all right. Don’t start tearing my clothes off again.” She stands and helps him to his feet. Her gun lies abandoned on the tile not far away. She picks it up, checks the safety, and shoves it in the waistband of her trousers.

Moriarty and his snipers are gone, and the only sign of the explosion is a long tower of flame rising behind them, a fire stretching from the ashes of the vest to the high ceiling above. There isn’t even much smoke, now – just the single fire, burning impossibly bright. “Definitely not Semtex, then,” Sherlock says, and the madman’s about to step closer to the flame when Joanna jerks him back with one hand on his arm. He scowls. “I only want to see what sort of accelerant he’s used. It would have to be fairly unusual to sustain such a controlled burn.”

It’s all-saint’s fire, of course; Moriarty must have hidden the spell in the fake explosives. The impact of the bullet would have been more than enough to set it off.

She could have started the fire herself, if she’d realised. Could have taken Moriarty with her and left Sherlock unharmed. Safe.

Sherlock stands beside her and watches the fire, his face unreadable, half in shadow. Joanna tightens her grip and leads him away.

 

++ 

 

They’ve only walked a few blocks from the sports centre when a black town car passes them in the street and pulls up to the kerb. Joanna tenses, reaching for the gun at her back; Sherlock stops her with a small shake of his head. The car door opens and Mycroft’s assistant steps out, mobile in hand. It chimes, and she glances up at them, looking rather bored. “Which is it?” she says. “Hospital or home?”

“Hospital,” Joanna says. “Sherlock’s ribs might be fractured.”

The corner of Sherlock’s mouth lifts in a strained sort of smile. “Well then,” he says, “it’s a lucky thing I’ve a doctor for a flatmate.” He pushes past the assistant and into the car. “To Baker Street, please, Alice. Before poor Doctor Watson collapses in a fit of pique, if possible.”

Joanna gives the assistant a pointed look. “Alice?”

The assistant ignores her, attention fixed on her mobile again. Joanna climbs into the car and sits beside Sherlock, her wet clothes squeaking against the leather seats. Alice takes the seat opposite and closes the door hard behind her.      

Joanna feels the single-minded focus of Sherlock’s gaze as the car pulls away from the kerb. His eyes are fixed on her face. “He took you in a car like this one.”

“Yes,” Joanna says, “he did.” She turns to Alice. “There’s a fire at a sports centre three streets from here, and the alarm system’s been disabled. Someone should probably phone the fire department.”

The assistant taps at her Blackberry, a small part of her face illuminated by its light. “We notified the authorities as soon as we learnt your location. They should arrive at the pool in approximately two minutes.”

Sherlock shifts forward in his seat. “Mycroft?”

“Gathering what information he can before the trail goes cold.” Sherlock makes a derisive noise and turns to the window. Alice looks up from the mobile and meets Joanna’s eyes. “If you’ve learnt anything that might be useful in the search—”

Joanna shakes her head, phrasing her response carefully. “I doubt I could tell you anything you don’t already suspect.”

“I see,” Alice says. She taps a button on her phone and lifts it to her ear. Mycroft answers immediately. “You’ll want me at the scene,” she says. “I’ll return as soon as the flat’s secured.” There’s a pause as Mycroft replies. “Yes, sir.” She rings off.

“You know you won’t find anything,” Sherlock drawls, his head tipped against the window glass. “He’s much too clever for that.” 

“Of course he is,” Alice says, her tone mild. “I assume that’s why you so enjoyed his attentions.”

Joanna waits for the usual lecture about the dangers of sentimentality and his tireless dedication to The Work, but it doesn’t come. Instead Sherlock stares silently out the window, his lips pressed together in a pained line.

“I’m looking at those ribs the moment we get home,” Joanna says, but if he hears her, he doesn’t respond. They sit in silence until the car turns onto Baker Street twenty minutes later.

Alice’s mobile chimes just as the car comes to a stop. She taps out a reply and then looks up. “Your flat is clear.” When they simply stare at her for another moment, she adds, “So you can go now.”  

“Right,” Joanna says, fumbling for the door handle. “Thank you, Alice. For the ride.”

Sherlock slips out the door on the other side and slams it closed behind him. Alice gives Joanna an amused, slightly pitying look. “Not Alice either, I’m afraid.”

“No,” Joanna says. “Of course not.”

Sherlock opens the door on Joanna’s side and leans down until they’re nearly face-to-face. “Alice, Anthea, Anita, Augusta – whatever her name, she isn’t interested. Now would you please end this pathetic attempt at flirtation and get out of the bloody car?”

“Excuse me,” Joanna says through gritted teeth, her face hot with embarrassment. “I have to get my flatmate upstairs so I can break the rest of his ribs. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” the assistant says, almost smiling. “We’ll be in touch.”

“I’m sure you will,” Sherlock says, and whirls off towards the front door of 221. Joanna steps out onto the pavement and closes the door firmly behind her. The car drives away.

Joanna turns, ready to indulge in a good, cathartic shout, but the fight goes out of her when she sees Sherlock’s face. His hair is still damp, drying in frizzing, awkward corkscrew curls, and his mouth twists with frustration as he searches his pockets.

Joanna sighs. “Don’t tell me – you’ve lost your keys again.”

“Probably when you dragged me out of the water with all the grace of a trained gorilla. I can already feel the bruises.” He gives up the search for the keys and slumps back against the locked door. “I don’t suppose you still have yours?”

“Yeah, a funny thing about kidnappers – they don’t tend to be terribly conscientious about returning one’s personal effects.” She climbs the steps and leans against the doorframe, loose hair falling over her shoulder. She pushes it back again, wincing as her fingers catch in the wet knots. “Should we try shouting for Mrs. Hudson, do you think, or go ‘round to the fire escape?”

He closes his eyes. “We could just stay out here. Enjoy the evening. Watch the sunrise.”

“Freeze to death. Get abducted again.”

His hand darts out blindly and grips her forearm. Joanna jumps, startled, but when he speaks his voice is perfectly normal. “Unlikely. Twice in one night would be excessive, Joanna, even for you.” He opens his eyes. “The fire escape, I think. Mrs. Hudson’s herbal soothers are surprisingly potent; we’d wake half the street before our voices penetrated the haze.”

Joanna’s not tall enough to reach the ladder to the fire escape, so it’s left to Sherlock and his bruised ribs to leap up and retrieve it. The climb to her bedroom window is easy enough, but the latch presents something of a problem.   

“An annoying habit of yours,” Sherlock says as he tries to coax it open with little success. “Locking things. Being _responsible_.”

Joanna shivers, her arms wrapped tight around her. Their clothes are nearly dry, but the damp and the cold and the slow, creeping exhaustion are taking their toll. They both stink of chlorine and smoke and Sherlock’s wincing now, every time he breathes too deep or lifts his left arm. She needs to get them inside.

“Let me try,” she says, and pushes him gently aside. It’s her latch, and it’s locking her window – a simple piece of steel bound to wood, atoms and electrons and the silent, ever-listening space between. _This is my home,_ she thinks; _let me in,_ and when she pushes the window slides open easily, without so much as a creak.

“I loosened it for you,” Sherlock says, and slips past her into the dark bedroom.

She wriggles through the window a moment later, cautious until her feet touch the floor. Sherlock has already stripped off his suit jacket and is starting work on his shirt cuffs. She closes the window, locks it, and switches on the bedside lamp.

The bruise loops dark around the left side of his chest, its colour deepest where her shoulder slammed into his side. She sees it all again – the challenge in Moriarty’s grin, the gun, and that first flare of light. The explosion that never came, and the open splay of Sherlock’s hands as he drifted to the pool’s floor.

“I still have one of Stamford’s stethoscopes,” he says. He’s watching her warily, his shirt crumpled in his hands. “It’s in the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink.”             

“Klepto,” she says, letting affection mask the tremor in her voice. “Sit down. I’ll go fetch it.”

He sits on the edge of her bed. “You’re shivering.”

“I’m cold.” She rescues his abandoned suit jacket from the floor and holds a hand out for his shirt. He gives it to her. “Don’t move,” she says. “I’ll be right back.”

His eyes follow her as she leaves the room, and for a moment her chest aches as it had beneath the water, too full and painfully tight. She stops in the corridor, breathless. 

She thought he was dead, but she was wrong. He’s just on the other side of the wall, listening for the sound of her footsteps.

The bathroom is wonderfully warm. She strips off her wet cardigan, her shoes and her socks, and dumps them all with Sherlock’s things into the bath. She washes her hands with hot water and soap, trying not to look too closely at her reflection in the mirror. Her hair is a tangled mess, her face raw and bruised dark beneath the eyes. She shuts off the tap and crouches down to open the cabinet.

The shelves under the sink are a jumble of scientific equipment, hair care products, and junk. Even so, it only takes her a moment to spot Stamford’s pilfered stethoscope. Sherlock’s left it on the top shelf, coiled neatly on top of her grandmother’s sewing kit.

When she returns to the room he’s still sitting on the bed, shirtless and moon pale even in the warm light of the bedside lamp. She moves close, until her knees touch his. “I’ll have to palpate the area around the bruise. It’s going to be painful.”

“Not a problem.” Sherlock opens his legs, letting her step between. He tips back his head and looks up at her, a smirk curling at the corner of his mouth. “I have a very high tolerance.”

“I don’t doubt it,” she says, and begins the exam.

He's right, of course – the ribs are only bruised, and even when she presses hard on the affected area his expression stays smooth and untroubled, a perfect mask.

“Sherlock, stop shamming. I need to know if it hurts.” 

Sherlock sighs his _why must you be so tedious_ sigh. “Oh, the pain,” he says. “The agony. It’s terrible. Oh god, the pain.”

“Git,” she says, and doesn’t bother to warm the metal diaphragm before pressing the stethoscope to the goose pimpled skin of his chest.

“ _Christ_ ,” he hisses, jerking back. “You could have warned me.”

She smiles beatifically at him. “Deep breaths, please. I’m going to listen to your lungs.”

His chest sounds clear, so she crawls behind him on the bed to listen at his back. She rests a hand on his shoulder and feels muscle tense beneath her palm. “Lean forward, just slightly.” After a moment’s hesitation, he does. She slips the stethoscope’s eartips back into place, muffling the sounds of the room around her, and sets the diaphragm high on his back. “Breathe for me.”

He inhales, and it sounds marvellous – a clear, clean rush of air that drowns out every other sound, any lingering doubt or fear. It’s easier now that he can’t see her face, and Joanna closes her eyes before she asks him to breathe again, working her way left to right down the lean breadth of his back.       

“Your pulse is a little fast,” she says when she reaches his heart. Her voice sounds strange through the seal of the eartips, and she swallows. “Everything all right?”

He nods, but now that she’s looking she can see that his fingers are clutching the edge of the mattress, his knuckles almost white.

She tugs the stethoscope from her ears. “Sherlock, if you’re in pain—”

“I’m fine,” he says, and sounds it. “The bruising is uncomfortable, but I’ve had worse. All it needs is paracetamol and an icepack.” He turns and fixes her with a close, calculating look. “I’d like to see your wrists now, please.”

She leans back a bit, putting some distance between them. “His men used plastic ties, and I pulled at them more than I should have. I doubt there’s any useful evidence there.”

“I’d still like to see them. Your ankles too, if you don’t mind.”

She studies his face for a long moment, the tension in his jaw and careful blankness behind his eyes. “I really am all right, Sherlock. He didn’t hurt me.”

“And my ribs were only bruised,” Sherlock says, “but you still needed to hear me breathe.”     

There’s a moment’s silence, and then she slips off the bed and stands in front of him. Her shirt buttons are small, white, plastic – they slip easily through the buttonholes until she can shrug the damp shirt off her shoulders and onto the floor. She still hasn’t regained all the weight and muscle she lost while she was ill, and she wears her belt buckled tight to keep her trousers from slipping down her hips. She sets the gun on her bedside table, then opens the belt and her trousers and pushes them to the floor, leaving her naked but for her sensible cotton pants and bra.

She doesn’t look at his face. She admires his mind for all its cold brilliance, but she doesn’t think she could bear to see indifference in his eyes now. She stares over his head at the empty wall. “Well?”

Long fingers circle her left wrist, lifting her hand. “They bound you while you were unconscious. Not tightly enough to cut off circulation, but the skin’s still raw where the tension in your arms pulled against the plastic.” He returns her hand to her side, and his fingers slip away. “You lost your temper with him. What did he say?”

She licks her lips. “I’m sure you can guess.”

“He enjoys exposing and manipulating weakness – my weaknesses, certainly. I suppose he did the same with you.” Sherlock pauses. “Which did he choose? Afghanistan or your father?”

“Afghanistan,” she says. He nods, a dark dip of his head from the edge of her vision.

“Step back,” he says, and when she does he slides off the bed and kneels at her feet. His hair brushes her thigh, and she can’t stop the gasp that hisses through her teeth. “More sensitive here,” he says, and she nearly stutters a denial before she feels him gently probing the bruised skin around her right ankle. “You must have injured one of his flunkies, if they felt the need to bind your feet as well as your hands.”

“Two flunkies, actually. Instep and dislocated fingers.”

He looks up from her feet, and she can’t help but meet his eyes. He’s smiling. “They always underestimate you.”

“You never did.”

Sherlock stands, the bruise a shadow across his ribs. “No, I didn’t. But then, I am rather clever.” He lifts his hand until his fingers hover over her left shoulder, just above the scar. “May I?”

She nods, unsure what her voice will reveal if she tries to speak.

His touch is delicate, clinical; she hardly feels it. “You’ll be sore here tomorrow. This joint absorbed most of the impact when you sent us into the water.” A damp strand of hair falls in his way, and he brushes it back over her shoulder. “Your hair was plaited when you left for Sarah’s. When did they undo it?”

“Before they put me in the vest. To unsettle me, I suppose. More psychological warfare.”

“Could be,” Sherlock says, and for a brief moment his expression turns rueful, almost self-mocking. “Though not, I think, directed at you.” He steps back, his hand falling to his side. “Turn around.”

Joanna thinks of his face in the moments after he turned and saw her standing by the water. Looks at him now, at the impatient purse of his mouth and his wild hair, and remembers the fear in his eyes when she opened the anorak and showed him the explosives beneath.

She turns.

Joanna keeps a wooden comb in the top drawer of her bedside table. She hears Sherlock reach for it, the creak of the drawer as it opens and closes, but she still tenses when he steps close and gathers her hair in his hands.

“I’d like to,” he says. “If you’d let me.”

Some change in her posture _(the dip of her shoulders, the curl of her open hands)_ must give her answer for her, because he lifts the wet weight of hair from her neck and begins to work the comb through, one knot at a time.

He’s almost too gentle – careful to hold the hair at its root, his grip too sure and his fingers too steady to jerk or pull. He eases each tangle free with the slow precision she’s seen him use with fragile fibres, with glass slides beneath microscopes and the taut strings of his violin. His touch is so light, it’s almost as if her hair unknots itself.

She jerks her head forward sharply, just to feel his grip.    

The pull surprises him, and he drops the comb. She hears it fall, but he doesn’t bend to pick it up. He stands close, and for a moment she can feel the warmth of him at her back. He drags his fingers through her hair, and they slip through easily, unimpeded by tangles or knots.

“He took you not far from the flat,” he says. His voice is cool, detached; it sounds strange through the rush of her pulse in her ears. “No farther than three streets away, because you consider that home territory and he wanted to make it clear that he can take you anytime, from anywhere he likes.” He pauses, and she feels a familiar tug at her temples as he begins to plait her hair. “Am I right?”

He knows he is. “It was Glentworth Street,” she says. “Outside that coffee shop.” 

He makes a small, satisfied noise. “A miscalculation on his part. I would’ve chosen a spot closer to Sarah’s.  You’ve lived in a war zone before, but an implicit threat to a civilian, to someone you care about – that would’ve made for a much more effective message. He missed an opportunity there.” 

“Maybe,” Joanna says. “Or maybe the message wasn’t meant for me.”

His fingers still. After a moment’s pause they continue, weaving the plait down her back. “The thought had occurred. I only have so many attachments to exploit; as my flatmate and colleague, you are the obvious choice.” He finishes the plait with quick, economical twists of his forearms and wrists and ties it off with the snap of an elastic. “No sane person would risk her life for a convenient flatshare.”

She smiles. “No sane person would call sharing with you convenient.” She turns her head to look over her shoulder at him, but he stops her. Brushes two cool fingers over the forgotten sting of the injection site at her throat, the welt and the bruise. She feels her pulse under his fingertips.

“Joanna,” he says, like the sound of her name is an argument in itself. “He would have burned you.”

 _The classics are classics for a reason,_ she thinks, and remembers the ashes of the vest, swallowed by flame. “He was playing with us. He never intended for me to burn.”

“And next time?”

Her eyes close. “Next time we’ll stop him.” 

“Joanna, I—” He goes silent. She listens to the sound of his breath in her ear. “I meant to thank you, earlier. For what you did. What you offered to do.” _Die for me_ , he doesn’t say, and the touch at her throat disappears. “I meant to thank you, and to say that if you ever do it again, I will cut you from my life so completely I won’t even be able to remember your name.”

“Sherlock—” She turns to face him, but he’s already backing away, moving toward the door.

“I’ve made myself perfectly clear. I see no reason to discuss it further.” He stops with one hand on the doorknob, his expression shuttered. “You won’t see me tomorrow. I’m going out.”

She folds her arms over her bare stomach. “If you need—”

“I’ll text,” he says, and leaves her standing alone in her bedroom, her hair still damp in its single, perfect plait.

 

++

 

Sherlock is already gone the next morning when Joanna leaves the flat. Which is just as well, really, considering what he’d think of her destination.

The room outside Mycroft’s Whitehall office is small and rather beige, its only decoration a murky painting of the ruins of a Greek colonnade and a lone, ruthlessly uncluttered desk. The new nameplate at the desk’s edge says simply: _Adrienne Mordus, Assistant_.

“Let me guess,” Joanna says, standing in the open door. “That’s not your name either.”  

Adrienne almost smiles, her eyes still fixed on her computer screen. “You don’t have an appointment.”

“I came to see you, not him.” Joanna pulls the wooden cigar box from her shopping bag and sets it down beside the keyboard. “Open it.”        

Adrienne continues typing. “No, thank you. I’m trying to quit.”

“I found it in our flat almost two weeks ago, under a stack of old papers.” Joanna lifts the lid, revealing the sawdust and shattered amber glass bottles inside. “At the time, I thought it was one of yours.”

The smell rises from the sawdust, and Adrienne’s fingers go still on the keyboard. She slowly turns her head and looks down at the box, her eyes slightly wide. “This was in your flat.”

“Alarming, isn’t it?” Joanna says. “Someone was spying on us, and for once it wasn’t you.”

Adrienne snaps up the box and pushes open the door to Mycroft’s office. She strides inside, and Joanna follows a step behind.

Mycroft is seated at his desk, on the phone. He presses the receiver to his chest, frowning. “My dear, I—” He looks again at Adrienne’s face and stops. Returns the phone into its cradle. “Good morning, Doctor Watson. This must be urgent indeed, if Adrienne’s let you through without an appointment. Or knocking.”

Adrienne steps up to his desk and shows him the open cigar box. “This was in your brother’s flat. It’s Moran’s.”

Something complicated happens behind Mycroft’s eyes, though his expression reveals nothing more than mild interest. “A weapon?”

“A bug,” Joanna says, resting her hands on the back of one of the visitor’s chairs. “It was recording everything we said in the flat and bottling our voices in that glass.”  

“Not just voices,” Adrienne says, still looking at Mycroft. “When retrieved properly, the information inside these bottles would include a rough psychic impression of any mind within a certain radius. Basic emotional responses, some surface level thought—”

Joanna frowns. “It was reading our minds? How is that even possible?”

Mycroft lifts a sardonic eyebrow. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,” he says, demonstrating an undoubtedly genetic ability to say the most irritating thing possible in any situation. He turns back to Adrienne. “If the bottles were destroyed before Moran could retrieve the information—”

“There are flakes of dried blood in the sawdust,” Joanna says. “I’ve never seen anything like this before, but even I know that means she maintained a direct connection to the spell. Whoever she is, this Moran person heard what we said as soon as we said it. Which reminds me.” She steps up to Mycroft’s desk and gives him a distinctly unfriendly smile. “Who is she?”

“ _He_ ,” Mycroft says, sitting back in his chair, “is Sebastian Moran, a devoted confederate of the man you know as James Moriarty.”

“His kept witch,” Adrienne adds, and takes a broken shard of amber glass from the box. She holds it up to the light. “Just as I am Mr Holmes’, and you are his brother’s.”

A muscle in Mycroft’s cheek twitches, a flinch so subtle that after a moment Joanna wonders if she saw it at all. “Kept, are you?” he says to Adrienne, his tone carefully light. “And here I was under the impression that you lived life free as the proverbial bird.”

Adrienne drops the glass shard back into the box. It lands with a muffled clink. “With access to Moriarty’s resources, Moran is a legitimate threat. I’ve suspected for some time that he’d returned to England, but I couldn’t be sure until I saw the all-saint’s fire at the pool last night.”                       

Joanna looks at the cigar box and its broken tangle of copper wire and glass. “Has a distinctive style, does he?”

Adrienne closes the box. “Everyone does, when you know what you’re looking for.” She turns to Mycroft. “This device was active during at least one of our recent visits to Baker Street. Moran knows I’m working for you, and he knows Doctor Watson is unable to defend your brother or herself.”

Joanna’s hands clench into fists at her sides, but Mycroft breaks in before she can disagree. “As I recall,” he says, “one of those visits ended with a near skewering by walking stick. I’d call that a fairly strong defence.”

“That was one of Helene Russell’s old spells; Watson had no conscious control over it. She wouldn’t last thirty seconds against Moran.” Adrienne looks Joanna up and down with a now-familiar expression of benign disinterest. “We’ll start by recasting the protective wards on your flat. They’ll be more potent if you do them yourself, and we can work from your grandmother’s book.” She sighs. “Better to begin with the familiar, I suppose, since you’ve so effectively crippled yourself.”

There’s a flare of pain in her leg and Joanna stumbles, leaning hard against the desk. “That’s…great,” she says through clenched teeth. “Well done. Really sensitive choice of words.”

Adrienne’s eyes go wide with exaggerated innocence. “Oh, I _am_ sorry – I didn’t realise you were so delicate. Shall I call for a doctor, or would you prefer to lick your imaginary wounds in private?”

Joanna shoves her shaking hand into her trouser pocket and forces herself to stand upright, pride overruling the pain. “I know what you’re trying to do, and you’re wasting your time.”

“Why?” Adrienne says. “Because you’ve denied yourself for so long that you’d rather let a homicidal maniac strap explosives to your chest than use magic to stop him?”

Mycroft looks back and forth between them like a spectator at an unexpectedly violent tennis match. “Ladies, if I may interject—”

Adrienne drops the cigar box to the desk and steps in close, her heels giving her the advantage of height. Joanna has to look up slightly to meet her eyes, and she finds that the one thing more unsettling than the other woman’s indifference is the chilling depth of her undivided attention. “Magic is not a hobby, Joanna, and it is not a toy to be tossed aside once you’ve outgrown fairy stories and your fear of the dark. You made your mother’s mistakes, and now out of sheer bloody-minded stubbornness you’ve reduced yourself to this – a doctor who knows nothing about healing, and a broken soldier with a stolen gun.” She sneers. “You’re a liability, and if James Moriarty gets what he wants, it will be your fault.”

With anger comes clarity, a pulse-slowing stillness that silences the screaming muscles of her leg. Joanna smiles. “I agree completely,” she says, and twists her finger into the thrice knotted piece of string in her trouser pocket. The rug beneath them ripples like a wave in water, and with a sudden, sinuous snap of hand-woven wool Joanna knocks the other woman off her feet and into the nearest chair. Adrienne lands hard, gripping the armrests with both hands, and the brief flash of genuine surprise on her face is just as satisfying as Joanna hoped it would be.

Her victory is a fleeting one; a moment later Adrienne gives her a cool smile, crosses her legs at the knee and leans back as if she’d simply been waiting for an excuse to sit. “Bit weak, but not bad after a twenty year sulk. Cotton or jute?”

Joanna takes the knotted string from her pocket and tosses it to her. “Cotton. It was all I had in the flat.”

Adrienne tests the first knot, and the edge of the rug twitches. “Not bad. I prefer coir when I use mass-produced. It has a nice spring to it.” She drops the string into Joanna’s open hand. “I could get you some, if you’d like.”

Joanna tucks the string back into her pocket. “Thanks. That’d be nice.”

Mycroft clears his throat, and they turn together to look at him. He leans forward and rests his elbows on the edge of his desk, amusement in the slight purse of his mouth. “When last we discussed the issue, Doctor Watson, you told us in no uncertain terms that the Craft was no longer a part of your life. May I ask what inspired this dramatic change of heart?”

Joanna sits in the empty chair beside Adrienne’s and meets the challenge in Mycroft’s steady gaze. “It’s pretty simple, actually. If I had used magic, I would’ve known the bomb was a fake. If I’d known the bomb was a fake, Moriarty would be dead.”

Mycroft inclines his head in a slow nod. “And if Moriarty were dead, Sherlock wouldn’t be out there now, readying himself for their next engagement. How wonderfully rational.” He sits back, hands folded over his stomach. “No doubt even Sherlock would approve, if all this weren’t such a terrible secret.”

Joanna looks at the cigar box on the desk. She can still smell the bitter mix of sawdust and magic and blood. “You have to tell him about Moran. It’s too dangerous for him not to know.”

“And you think he’d believe me?”

“Maybe not, but at least he won’t try to get _you_ sectioned.”

Mycroft tips his head slightly to one side, watching her with a bland sort of curiosity. “He trusts you, Joanna. Don’t you think he deserves to have that trust returned?”

 _I want to forget I ever saw you at all_ , the boy had said, and in the simplest, strongest of magics that’s all that’s required – intent and the sting of fresh-spilled blood. Joanna looks down at the long-faded scars of her open palm and says, “I can’t, Mycroft. Don’t ask me again.”

She can feel Adrienne’s gaze fixed on her face. She doesn’t look up to meet it. “Sherlock has spent the last few hours trying to gain access to Moriarty’s official file on our secure server,” Adrienne says. “It lists Moran as a likely associate – that should be enough to start with, I’d think.” She stands, takes the cigar box from Mycroft’s desk and tucks it under her arm. “Shall I give him a nudge in the right direction, sir?”

“Yes, I think so. Subtly, please.”

Adrienne gives him an arch, insulted look. “Of course, sir,” she says, and leaves the office. She closes the door behind her. 

“Moriarty has an official file?” Joanna asks.

“Not as promising as it sounds, unfortunately. What we know of the elusive Mr. Moriarty makes for a disturbingly short read. I intend to change that in the coming weeks.” He sits forward, smoothing a hand over his tie. “Much as I enjoy your company, Joanna, it’s time we came to the point. You didn’t come here today just to show us the box.”     

Joanna shifts in her chair. “No.”

“You need a favour.”

“I need to retrieve some of my grandmother’s things, and I need to do it without Moriarty or Sherlock knowing where I’ve gone. Can you help?”

Mycroft nods, impassive. “I can.”

He doesn’t say anything more, and Joanna grits her teeth. “ _Will_ you help?”

“Happily. All you need do, Joanna, is ask. After all, you’re very nearly family, aren’t you?”   

Joanna sighs. “Mycroft, you know perfectly well that Sherlock and I—”

An expression of genuine amusement flickers across his face. “Yes, of course. I was only speaking of family in the figurative sense. I’m sure Sherlock thinks of you as the sister we never had.” The corner of his mouth twitches. “Your feelings, I assume, are equally sororal.”

“Of course,” Joanna says, perhaps a little too stiffly. “We’re all like one big, happy family.”  

“I’m so glad you think so.” He stands, buttoning his suit jacket. “A car will be waiting for you at the exit. Just tell the driver whether you’d prefer to go to the house or to your sister’s self-storage unit in Haringey.”

“How do you—” Joanna stops, shaking her head. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.” She pushes herself out of the chair. “You’re sure I won’t be followed? Those town cars aren’t as inconspicuous as you think.” 

He frowns. “You believe that one of Moriarty’s men followed you here.”

“If he did,” she says, “I didn’t see him.”

“Which makes you all the warier. Very sensible of you.” He walks to the door. “I don’t make many promises, Joanna, but I will promise you this – Moriarty will know neither where you have gone, nor what you have gone to collect. At least, not through any fault of mine.” He opens the door, revealing the empty outer room beyond. “Lovely to see you as always. Don’t hesitate to phone if I can be of any further use.”  

Mycroft’s careful composure is as difficult to read as ever, but it has a forced quality that unsettles her. She pauses inside the doorway and meets his eyes. “You’re frightened for him, aren’t you?”

Mycroft looks away. “My brother has many fine qualities, but for all his efforts, he has never quite mastered the degree of ruthlessness required in these situations. His new playmate suffers no such handicap.” He gives her a grim smile. “Which is why I’m glad he has you.” 

Joanna steps through to the outer room. “Thank you, Mycroft. For the car.”

“Anytime, Doctor Watson,” Mycroft says, and closes the door behind her.  

 

++

 

Joanna is completely unsurprised when she opens the door of the waiting town car and finds Adrienne already inside, tapping at her Blackberry.

“I could be wrong,” Joanna says, “but I think there are sigils for invisibility written on these tyres.”

The Blackberry chimes. “You’re not wrong.”

Joanna looks again at the white, curving lines painted on the rubber. “An invisible car?” she says. “Isn’t that a bit dangerous?”

Adrienne sighs. “You’re oversimplifying. Turn around.”

“What?”

“Turn around, and then look back at the car.”

Joanna turns around. The building rises tall above her, its featureless stone façade almost deliberately bland. She turns toward the street and sees one of Mycroft’s town cars waiting for her, door open. Adrienne is already inside, staring at the screen of her Blackberry.

Joanna leans down and looks into the car. “I could be wrong,” she says, “but I think there are sigils for invisibility written on these tyres.”

Adrienne purses her lips, as if she’s trying to fight a smile. “Well spotted.”

Joanna looks again at the white, curving lines painted on the rubber. “An invisible car?” she says. “Isn’t that a little—” She stops, frowning. There’s something eerily familiar about this moment. About the words she was about to say. 

Adrienne looks up from her mobile, expectant.

Sigils are complex, capricious things, often highly personal and easy to misread; the basic intent of the spell on the tyres is invisibility, sure enough, but the subtleties—

Adrienne smirks.

“Oh, very funny,” Joanna says. She climbs into the car and takes the seat opposite, slamming the door behind her. “A forgetting spell, then. How many times did it take before I realised?” 

“You don’t want to know.” She looks down at her mobile again. “Your grandmother’s house is still one of the most heavily warded buildings in Greater London. Anything you want to keep from Moriarty is safer there than in Baker Street.”

Joanna has a vague memory of a spell on the front door that chased off a pushy Bible salesman; that was years ago now, but the house is old and that sort of magic tends to linger.  She shrugs. “What I want isn’t at the house.”

Adrienne nods. “Haringey, then,” she says, and the car pulls away from the kerb.  

The self-storage facility is in a business park, a sprawling ghost town of concrete and glass. The car drops them at the main entrance, and after a few minutes of echoing footsteps they find the right environmentally controlled corridor. The key Harry gave her months ago is marked with a tag for storage unit number 337; Joanna takes it from her coat pocket and reaches for the lock. 

Adrienne steps close behind her. “You don’t need that.”

Joanna pauses. “I do, actually. If I’m going to open the door.”

Adrienne holds out her hand, empty and palm up. “I’ll give it back if you can’t manage,” she says. Her lips quirk in a small, taunting smile. “Think of it as an experiment.” 

A test, more like. Joanna drops the key into her open hand. “I’ll try, but it isn’t going to work.”

Adrienne closes her hand, and when she opens it again the key is gone. “I assume you remember how to begin?”

Joanna bends down slightly, rolls out the stiffness in her bad shoulder, and places her left hand over the lock. It’s stainless steel, new or in very good nick, and its edges press sharp and cool into the flesh of her palm. Sherlock could pick it in minutes.

Joanna closes her eyes. _I belong inside,_ she thinks. _Let me in_.

The answer comes in nothing like words, but she understands it nonetheless: She does not belong. Those who belong have the key. Strangers do not have the key, and strangers do not come inside. _She_ does not come inside. 

 _I am not a stranger_ , Joanna thinks. _You belong to my sister. My blood._

The lock is not a house lock – it does not belong to anyone. It opens for the key. Strangers do not have the key, and strangers do not come inside.

Joanna opens her eyes and looks up at Adrienne. “This lock is an idiot.”

“I don’t know about that,” Adrienne says, leaning against the door of unit number 339. “From here it looks as if it’s doing its job rather well.” 

“I told you this wouldn’t work,” Joanna says, but Adrienne just stares back at her, unmoved.

“Try anyway,” she says. Her Blackberry chimes, and she looks down at the screen. Her jaw tenses briefly before her expression turns blank again.

Joanna knows that jaw clench – she’s felt it often enough, usually just after Sherlock summons her with one of his ill-timed, infuriatingly cryptic texts. “If Mycroft needs you at the office—”

“He doesn’t,” Adrienne says, and walks off down the corridor, phone already at her ear. “Now stop stalling and open the damned door.” Her heels click in quick percussion against the concrete, and Joanna listens as the sound of her footsteps fades. 

Gran had disapproved of witches who used magic when a mundane solution would do just as well. She’d called them wasteful, self-indulgent, and Joanna never had any reason to doubt her – her grandmother was the only other proper witch she’d ever met.

Gran would never have opened a door with magic when she had the key in her pocket. That sort of flash behaviour was for amateurs and table-rappers.

But then, Joanna _is_ an amateur, and she _doesn’t_ have the key. And her gran has been dead for an awfully long time.   

She reaches into her trouser pocket and takes out the broken stick of white chalk she’d nicked from a drawer in Sherlock’s desk that morning. It’s been some time since she last wrote in chalk; it feels cool in her too-warm hand, sliding smooth between her fingers. She crouches in front of the storage unit lock and writes the first sigil. Chalk squeaks against steel.

The lock objects. Those who belong have the key, and that is not the key. That does not belong.

“Sorry, mate,” Joanna says, joining a second sigil to the first. “You’re not really in a position to argue.” The third sigil is a signature of sorts, a declaration of intent, and as she writes she feels the world shift a bit, uneasy beneath her feet. There’s a sound like approaching thunder, a slow rumble of pressure building behind her eyes, and she quickly returns the chalk to her trouser pocket. “Suppose I haven’t forgotten everything she taught me,” she says, and presses her left thumb over the keyhole.

 _Well,_ _shit_ , the lock does not quite say, and a moment later the sigils flare blue and white with heat. The door rattles like a caged animal in its frame, echoed by every door along the hallway, and the sound grows louder and fiercer until there’s a hard click from inside the lock. The sound stops, and the corridor is still.

The left side of Joanna’s body feels as if it’s been plunged into ice water; she staggers to her feet and grins. “Hoo _boy_ ,” she says, to no one and for no particular reason. Then she says it again, louder, just because she can. Magic is _brilliant._

“Ah,” Adrienne says, appearing from bloody nowhere like the creepy witch-person she is. “You’re one of _those_.”

“So’s your face,” Joanna says cheerfully, and yanks hard on the door handle with the cold-numb fingers of her left hand. It opens, and the lights overhead blink on to reveal a long, narrow room piled high with boxes.

The nearest stacks are the remnants of Harry’s married life, crates of china and cookware and large boxes of clothes little more than a season out of style, all labelled in Clara’s pleasant, looped handwriting. Joanna shuffles down the breath-tight aisles between stacks, moving deeper into the unit. She eases past the small pile of banker’s boxes she’d left with Harry before she’d gone to Afghanistan – packed with books she couldn’t bear to part with and the few small things from her Barts years she’d let herself keep – and nearly falls over a cardboard mausoleum dedicated to Harry’s shoe collection, circa 1997. Behind her, Adrienne sneezes. The sound is vaguely goose-like, and Joanna smiles.

“If I knew what you were looking for, I might be able to help you find it,” Adrienne says, sounding like someone so used to knowing all the answers that she can’t quite remember how to ask a question. Joanna can’t help but notice that she also sounds like someone who needs to blow her nose.

“Snotty,” Joanna mutters, just under her breath, and weaves her way through stacks of boxes and crates and disassembled furniture. The dust grows thicker as she passes from the mid- to the early nineties, and then, from the corner of her eye, she sees her grandmother’s kitchen table.

The table is propped up on its end, pushed against the back wall of the storage unit and surrounded by dust-dark cardboard boxes. Layers of greying bubble wrap protect the table legs where they jut out into the room, but the names etched on the underside are exposed. Adrienne pushes past her, steps neatly around the pieces of a broken loom, and moves close enough to read them.   

“This should be with you or your sister,” she says, her eyes on the long columns of names and dates burnt black into the wood. “It’s meant to be used.”

“I know. But Harry won’t take it, and I don’t have the space.” Joanna tears through the tape sealing the nearest cardboard box. It’s filled with record albums, the ones her grandmother would play when she sat up at night, unable to sleep. Joanna remembers lying in bed, half-awake and straining to listen. She could never quite hear the music. 

She looks up and sees Adrienne still staring at the table. She’s reaching out with one hand, fingers almost touching the wood.

“I’m looking for a book,” Joanna says. “I’ll probably find it faster if you help.”    

The hand falls back to Adrienne’s side, and she turns. Her expression is a careful blank. “A spell book?”

“Not exactly.” She closes the box of albums and sets it behind her, on the floor. She opens the next box in the stack. “Just bring me all the books you find. I’ll remember it when I see it.” 

Adrienne sniffs. “How efficient,” she says with a familiar edge to her voice, and rips the tape off the lid of the nearest box. She opens it, rolls her eyes, and drops it to the floor beside her.

“Let me guess,” Joanna says. “Gran’s prized collection of rare animal bones.”

“Worse,” Adrienne says, moving on to the next box. “Her prized collection of Barry Manilow albums.”

They search without speaking for more than half an hour, each trying to pretend they hadn’t heard the other humming _Mandy_ under her breath. Adrienne brings Joanna boxes of Harry’s ratty schoolbooks, her mother’s murder mysteries, her father’s favourite anthologies of modern poetry. _Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood_ , her father liked to say, but they were not his words – no more than _the moment of the rose and of the yew tree_ or _April is the cruellest month._ Not with a bang but a whimper. 

 _Fear death by water,_ she thinks, and hears the words in her father’s voice. 

There is a book in her hands. She doesn’t remember taking it from the box, but now she feels its weight, and the soft, curling edges of its blue paper jacket. The cover is blank, and when she opens to the first page to find its title, the paper slices into the vulnerable skin between her thumb and forefinger. Startled by the pain, she drops the book and raises her hand to her mouth. She tastes dust with the blood, and looks down to see the book open on the floor.

It’s a storybook. The paper is yellow-edged and thick, the typeface familiar in its old style slenderness. _CONTENTS_ , it says at the top of the page, and the stories are listed below. _The Singing Bone, Page 3. The Lion and the Thorn, Page 6. The Woman Who Had No Shadow, Page 8._

Joanna picks up the book with unsteady hands. These were the stories of her childhood – _Oda and the Snake, The Witch and the Hare, Simon the Thief and the Hand of Glory. The Golem of Prague, The Endless Tale_ , and _Dildrum, King of the Cats_. She and Harry read them over and over again, stealing the book back and forth between them in the day and repeating their favourites aloud each night in the dark, long after they were meant to be asleep.     

They’d packed the book away when their parents died, along with her mother’s murder mysteries and her father’s poetry. Harry was too old for fairy stories then, and as the years passed Joanna forgot, as she’d forgotten so many things. 

 _Agamede and the Moon_ is the book’s last story. Joanna sinks down to sit on a nearby steamer trunk, turning past brittle pages filled with animals that speak and murdered children who sing, men built from river clay and thieves who fear the dark. Stories that change the shape of the world.     

They all begin the same way.

    

 

 

Once upon a time there was a man who was dying, and Death came and stood outside his door. 

The man was a hermit, and he lived alone in a small cottage in the forest. A young girl was gathering wild-growing herbs in the shade of the trees, and when she saw Death waiting outside the cottage door, she took up her basket and went to him.

“He will not open his door to you,” the girl told Death. She did not curtsey or bow or say _good day, good sir_ as she had been taught; she was not the sort to waste time with pointless courtesies. “This is a hermit’s cottage,” she said, “and he does not welcome strangers.”

“I am a stranger to no man,” Death said. “Nor to any woman, or little village girl.” Death turned back to the closed door. “The hermit will leave with me before moonrise. He need not welcome me.”

The girl thought this over carefully. Then she said: “Sir, I would offer you a wager.”

Death, as every man, woman, and little village girl knows, cannot be begged nor bought nor fooled, but he does have a gambler’s fondness for a likely wager. “There is nothing you could give that I should want,” Death said, though of course this was not true, and they each knew it. “You have no business here. Return home to your mother and father.”

“You have already taken them,” the girl said without reproach. “I was very young then, but I remember you well.”

Death looked again at the girl. She had a stubborn chin. But for the healthy summer flush of her skin, it was not unlike his. “The hermit’s fever is a fatal one, child. You cannot win his life from me.”

“I will cure the hermit whether you agree to my wager or not,” the girl told Death. “His life is not the prize.” She opened the door of the cottage and raised her stubborn chin. “If the hermit lives through the night, you will give me one gift – one that I will name.”

“Very well,” Death said. “And if he does not?”

“Then you may take me as well,” the girl Agamede said, “and save yourself the journey later.”  

“It is your life to gamble,” Death said, and, satisfied, the girl closed the door and set to work.  

The hermit’s cottage was dark and smelled of rotting food and sick; the girl pinned the curtains back from the windows and let in light and the summer air. The hermit slept and sweated with fever; the girl drew pails of cool water from the well and scrubbed him clean with a rag torn from the hem of her skirts. When all this was done she built a small fire in the hearth and brewed a tea with the herbs of her basket.     

The hermit woke as she pulled him upright and set the cup to his lips. “I am already dead, girl,” the hermit said in a voice that crackled like burning wood. “I wish to suffer it alone. Leave me be.”

“It is _alone_ that has killed you, old man,” the girl said. “Now save your breath and drink.”

The hermit drank the tea, and when it was gone he slept again. The girl sat beside his bed and watched the sun sink below the trees. She lit a candle to keep away the dark, and it burned until sunrise.   

When daylight filled the cottage, the girl went to the window and saw Death standing again at the door. “I think you’ll find, sir, that you owe me a gift of my choosing.”

“So choose,” Death said. “You will have anything it is in my power to give.”

“I want to never again suffer famine or drought. I want never to be hungry.” The girl leaned out the window and gave Death a grin not unlike his own. “I want the cornucopia.”

Death reached into his cloak and drew out a twisted, bone-white horn. It looked to be hollow, but when Death raised it, the air around them filled with the golden smell of a harvest feast, of ripe, full fruits and warm-baked bread. The girl accepted the horn and tucked it close under her arm. “You intend to take the hermit at moonrise,” she said.

“You have stolen for him one day more of suffering,” Death said. “He will not thank you for it.”

“I do not want his thanks,” the girl said. “I want him to live through the night. If he does, you will give me a second gift – one that I will name.”

“Very well,” Death said, rather more reluctantly than he had the time before. “And if he does not?”

“Then you may take me as well,” the girl Agamede said, “and save yourself the journey later.”  

“It is your life to gamble,” Death said a second time, and, satisfied, the girl left the window and returned to the hermit’s bedside.

The hermit slept restlessly, burning still with fever. The girl touched cool fingers to his forehead, to the echo of his heart’s beat at throat and wrist. He stirred, but did not wake.

The twisted horn was not heavy in the girl’s hand, and it was not light. When she looked into it she saw nothing, but when she reached inside she felt its potential – the weight of the world’s abundance in her small hand. Her mouth watered at the thought of olives and of wine, of ripe apples and rich creams and foods she’d only ever dreamt of, but when her hand emerged from the horn she held only a single pomegranate. It was as red as a drop of a village girl’s blood, and smelled as sweet as a kiss.

The hermit opened his eyes. “The fruit of the dead,” he said, his voice raw with fever. “Do you prepare my funeral meal, girl?”

“Only a fool wastes his food on the dead,” the girl said, and set the pomegranate aside. She reached inside the horn again, and this time she pulled out a tangle of summer radishes. “Now save your breath, old man, and eat.”  

The girl ground the flesh of the radishes into a thin paste and seasoned it with the last herbs of her basket. She warmed the paste over the hearth fire and then fed it to the hermit, spoonful by spoonful. 

“Death must taste better,” the hermit said, but he ate all the same. When it was gone, he slept deeply. The girl sat beside his bed and watched the sun rise in the sky before it sank again below the trees. She lit a candle to keep away the dark, and it burned until sunrise.   

When daylight filled the cottage, the girl went to the window and saw Death standing again at the door. She held out a hand and offered him the pomegranate. He did not take it. “The hermit’s fever has broken,” the girl said. “He has no need of you now.”

“Fever is not the only way a man might die,” Death said. He moved closer, and his long shadow fell over the open window, blocking out the sun. “Choose your gift, child. You will have anything it is in my power to give.”

The girl stood silent for a long moment. Then she lifted her stubborn chin. “I want a blade as sharp as blood is red,” she said to Death, “with a shaft as long as night is black.”

“There is only one such blade,” Death said, “with only one such shaft.”

“Yes,” the girl said, “and it is yours to give.”

And so Death gave the girl Agamede his scythe, with its blade as sharp as blood is red and its yew-wood shaft as long as night is black. The girl took it, and held it close at her side.

“I will reap your hermit tonight, blade or no blade,” Death said. “But first I would offer you a wager.”

The girl’s grip on the scythe tightened. “I will listen.” 

“If the hermit lives through this night,” Death said, “you may ask a third gift of me, and when that business is done I will leave this place. You will keep my gifts, and not see me again for many years yet.”

“And if he dies?”

Death reached out and plucked the pomegranate from the windowsill. “Then I will take you as well,” Death said, “and save myself the journey later.” 

“It is my life to gamble,” she said, and returned to the hermit’s bedside.

The hermit lay awake, his clever eyes unclouded by fever. The girl touched her fingers to his forehead, to the echo of his heart’s beat at throat and wrist. He batted her hand away. “Girl,” he said, “you have not slept.”

“No,” she said, “but you have.”

She reached again into the twisted horn of plenty and used its gifts to prepare a thin soup for him to eat. He held the spoon himself and lifted it to his lips with an unsteady hand. “Girl,” he said, “you have not eaten.”

“No,” she said, “but you have.” She took the empty bowl from his hands. “Now save your breath, old man, and rest.”

The hermit slept through the heat of the day, and when the sun sank below the trees the girl lit a candle to keep away the dark. She sat in the chair beside the old man’s bed, and though she was as tired as she had ever been, she did not sleep. She watched the flickering light of the candle, and though she was as hungry as she had ever been, she did not eat.

Instead she listened.

There was the smallest of sounds from without the walls, a sound as soft as the footsteps of scattering mice and as sharp as the slow scrape of five bone fingers at the door. The girl sat by the burning candle and waited.

The door to the hermit’s cottage opened and a thief came inside. His hands and feet and face were wrapped in black rags, and he carried a knife, its blade wicked and stained.  

“We have no gold,” the girl told the thief. She did not quiver or cry or say _please, sir, I am only a little village girl_ as was expected; she was not the sort to waste time with pointless courtesies. “We have no gold, but if you seek shelter, you are welcome to share this roof until morning.”

“I do not seek shelter,” said the thief.

“We have no coin,” the girl said, “but if you hunger, you are welcome to share our food.”

“I do not hunger,” said the thief.

The girl stood from her chair beside the old man’s bed. “Then there is nothing to be done for you,” she said, and blew out the candle.

The thief struck out in the dark with his knife, but the girl raised Death’s scythe and with one swing parted the thief’s soul from his body. His empty flesh fell at her feet, and the rest of him went out again through the cottage door, where Death waited with open hands.

The hermit watched from his bed, his clever eyes open wide in the moonlight. “Girl,” he said, “you are cut.”

“Yes,” she said, “but you are not.” She lit the candle again and used a strip of cloth torn from the hem of her skirt to bind the bleeding wound in her arm. Then she sat again in the chair at the hermit’s bedside and waited for the sun to rise. 

When daylight filled the cottage, the girl went to the window for the third time and met Death with her stubborn chin raised high. “The hermit lives,” she said, and behind her the old man sighed in his sleep.

“Choose your gift,” Death said, “and choose wisely.”

The girl did not hesitate. “I want your book of secrets,” she said, “so that neither I nor any person I love ever need fear you again.”

And so Death reached into his cloak and drew out a small book of yellow-edged pages bound in skin, withered and black. The girl took it from him and held it close to her chest. It was as cold in her hands as a slab of ice, and the heat of her skin did not warm it. She smiled.

“Good day, good sir,” the girl Agamede said to Death.

“And to you, child,” Death said, and was gone.

Years passed, and Death kept his word; the girl did not see him again. She took the book, the blade, and the horn and travelled far from the village where she’d been a child, through forests and cities, along deep ravines and across storm-churned seas, and wherever she went she used Death’s own gifts to save those he would have taken. Word of her skill spread far, and with the secrets written in the black book she cured kings in their castles and labourers in their fields, delivered whole those infants meant to die and restored to the aged the strength of youth. The girl grew to be a woman, and where she walked the people had no fear of death.

But the woman Agamede was not content. Before he had given her his final gift, Death had torn a single page from the book of secrets – the only page the woman truly wanted. She had at her fingertips the hidden, final fate of every man, woman, and child she met, but without that page she could not know her own. Death had deceived her, and for all her skill and secret knowledge the woman was as mortal as she had always been.

After many years her travels led her back to the forest of her childhood and the cottage of the old hermit. The man lived there still, for after three days and nights spent waiting outside his door Death had tired of the sight of him, and now felt no eagerness to return.

“Or so I imagine,” the hermit said, and there was laughter in his clever old eyes. “Whatever the reason, I have not seen him – not since last I saw you, girl.”

They talked of her travels, of the places she had seen and the deaths she had undone, and when they had finished the hermit emptied the cup in front of him and said, “I never thanked you for what you did.”

The woman shrugged. “I did not do it for you, old man.”

He laughed. “I do not doubt that. Still, I owe you a debt; I would like to see it settled.”

“There is nothing you could give that I should want,” the woman said. 

The old man’s lips spread in a wide, bone-white grin.

There was a forgotten legend, he said, a legend of a pool in the forest whose waters were as dark as ink and as still as a mirror. It had been hidden long ago and wisely, for a man who looked on his reflection in the pool’s surface saw not his own face, but a reflection of the future – a glimpse of his final, mortal fate.

“Show me,” the woman said, and the hermit led her out of the cottage and deep into the forest night.

They found the pool at the heart of a grove of birch trees, far from the village and the home of any living man. The trees were bare, and stood like pale sentries around the water. The woman reached out and found their bark cold to the touch. The pool lay just beyond, its surface as still as silence and as smooth as glass.

“This is what you wanted,” the hermit said. “This is what you sought from the beginning.”

The woman walked past him, through the trees and close to the water’s edge. “I was tired of being afraid.” 

“There was nothing to fear, child. All things die.”

“I am not a child anymore,” the witch Agamede said, and looked down at her reflection in the pool’s still water.

A stranger looked back at her, his round face luminous and pale. He was beautiful and his eyes were kind, and Agamede, who had cared neither for beauty nor for kindness, could not turn away from him. She sank to her knees beside the water and as the hours passed she forgot all but the sight of his face. The sun rose, sanguine and gold, and when its light touched the pool the man was gone.

“I should have spoken to him,” Agamede said, her words weighted with grief. “I should have begged him to stay.”

“He will return,” the hermit’s voice said from the trees. “You need only wait.”

And so the witch Agamede stayed by the water, the memory of the man’s face burning in her mind like candle flame.

Night fell again, and the man’s image returned to the surface of the pool. Agamede spoke to him, told him of her travels, of the places she had seen and the deaths she had undone, but if the man heard her, he did not reply. The sun rose and set and rose again, and for ten nights and days she slept and watched and wept at the water’s edge, offering the man her secrets and her skill, her blood and her breath. He wanted none of it, and as one night passed to the next her love slowly turned away from her, his pale face fading into the dark.

On the eleventh night she offered the horn, and held it low over the water. “If you are to leave me,” she said, “I shall need neither food nor drink.” She opened her hands, and the cornucopia sank without a ripple. Her love did not reply.

On the twelfth night she offered the scythe, and it shook her in her hands for the first time. “If you are to leave me,” she said, “I shall need neither blade nor shaft.” Death’s scythe slipped into the dark water; her love still did not reply.

On the thirteenth night the witch woman Agamede stood at the pool’s edge and waited for her love to appear in the water. Hours passed, and the surface was as dark as the moonless sky above.

“He is gone,” said a voice like the hermit’s, a voice from the white birch trees. “He has left you.”

She looked down at the pool, the book of secrets cold in her hands. “If he has left me,” she said, “I shall have no fear of death.” She watched as the book sank seamlessly beneath the water, and then she turned.

Death stood among the trees, the pomegranate red in one hand and a single torn page of yellowed paper in the other. She did not need to read it to know what it said.

The Lady Agamede followed her love into the water.

                                     

 

  

“I never much liked that version,” Adrienne says, her even voice echoing in the metal-walled silence. “Never liked the ending.”   

Joanna looks up and sees the other woman standing above her, lips pressed in a bloodless expression too sharp to be a smile. The book lies open between them, clutched in Joanna’s white-knuckled hands. “I forgot this,” Joanna says, and the pages buckle in her grip. “How did I forget this?”

“Some things aren’t meant to be remembered.”  

Joanna stands, furious and beautifully, beatifically calm. “And what the bloody fuck,” she says, “is that supposed to mean?”

The other woman takes a step back. “Doctor Watson—”

“Moriarty asked if I remembered the story of Agamede’s Mirror. I’d forgotten, but I knew I’d seen the name before – in Seostris’ burned arcana, and in _this_.” She raises the book between them. “Tell me this is just a children’s story. Tell me it isn’t real.”

Adrienne stares back at her, sphinx-like and unmoved, and eases the book from her hand. “This is only a story. The mirror is real, and Agamede was its creator.”

Joanna sinks back down to sit on the streamer trunk. The anger is gone, but the clarity stays – the clarity and the terrible, steady-handed calm. “A mirror that shows you your own death. My grandmother’s mirror.”

“Agamede’s, passed down from descendant to descendant. Passed down to you.” Adrienne steps closer, and her heels click on the concrete floor. “What did you see in it, Joanna?”

 _A boy_ , Joanna thinks. _I saw a lonely boy, and he saw me._ She closes her eyes and sees him again – pale face and dark hair and the effortless, steadying surety that whether she could see him or not he was always there, just on the other side of the glass. 

A hand touches her shoulder. “Watson?”

“Sherlock,” Joanna says. “When I looked in the mirror, I saw Sherlock Holmes.” Then she covers her face with her hands and _laughs_.   

“Ah,” Adrienne says. “You’ve snapped, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” Joanna gasps, laughing so hard tears well in her eyes. “Yes, but ages ago. Oh god—” She dissolves into giggles again, and Adrienne stands back, the book tucked awkwardly under one arm. For the first time since Joanna met her, she looks as if she doesn’t know what to say.

“It’s not – the mirror is as difficult to interpret as any other form of divination. It doesn’t mean Sherlock is going to _kill_ you.”

“Of course he’s bloody well going to kill me,” Joanna says, grinning wide enough to make her cheeks ache. “Less than twelve hours ago I put a psychotic criminal mastermind in a headlock for the man, and God only knows what I’ll be doing for him twelve hours from now; I hardly need some ancient magical artefact to tell me how _that’s_ going to end.” She shakes her head, drying her eyes with the edge of her sleeve. “Oh, what a relief. I thought for sure all this was going to mean something awful once I sorted it out.”

“You’re insane,” Adrienne says flatly.

“Probably. But then, I’m also a crime fighting ex-Army witchdoctor, so that may come with the territory.” She pushes herself to her feet. Her leg feels wonderfully solid beneath her, the strongest it’s been all morning. “You’re going to tell Mycroft about this, aren’t you?”

The other woman pauses, and for a moment she looks almost bemused, as if she’d forgotten the elder Holmes entirely and was struggling to place the name. “I don’t see why I should,” she says finally. “We’ve been aware of Moriarty’s obsession with the mirror for some time, but without Moran he had little hope of finding it. Now that his pet warlock is returned to London—” She shrugs and offers Joanna the book. “Moriarty will either use the mirror or he will not. What you’ve seen in it is irrelevant.”

“Not to me, and certainly not to Mycroft. If he knew I was destined to die for his brother’s sake—”

“You’re not _destined_ to do anything,” Adrienne says, her voice hard with an emotion Joanna can’t define. “That’s not how it works, and you know it. If you stay with him, you’re choosing this. If you leave Baker Street tonight—”

“Not going to happen,” Joanna says, and though she’s smiling, there’s nothing friendly in it. “Not tonight, and not tomorrow night. Probably not the night after that, either, but that depends more on the state of Sherlock’s latest toxic mould experiment than on anything you might say.” She takes the book from Adrienne’s hand and drops it neatly into an open box. “I’d like to go home now. Are you driving me, or do I need to phone for a cab?”

The ride back to Baker Street is silent but for the hum of the engine and the soft sounds of Adrienne’s mobile. Joanna leans against the town car window and watches the city flow past, a London bleached colourless by the height of the midday sun. Her shoulder aches, but her mind is clear.

When the car slows to a stop outside the flat, Adrienne breaks the silence. “Moran will try to get access to the house. He’ll have guessed Helene hid the mirror there.”

Joanna turns from the window, but the other woman’s eyes are still fixed on the glowing screen of her mobile. “You didn’t just read about my grandmother in a file, did you? You knew her.”

“The wards on the house will hold, and I’ll see to it that your sister’s home is secure. Your flat, on the other hand—”

“I’ll take care of the flat. Gran died in ’91; you must be older than you look.” 

Adrienne lowers her mobile and meets Joanna’s eyes. “James Moriarty knows that you and your sister are the last surviving descendants of one of the most powerful witches who ever lived. The only reason he hasn’t shut you up in a cellar somewhere and unravelled your intestines inch by inch is his now incorrect assumption that you don’t know anything worth hearing. In that light, it might be wise to spend a little more time planning your next move and a little less speculating about my personal life.” She reaches across the seat and opens the car door with a sharp tug on the handle. “Now if you don’t mind, I’m needed at the office.”

Joanna laughs, the sound dry and humourless. “No, please – let’s talk more about my vivisected intestines. It was doing wonders for my appetite.” She pushes the door open and climbs out. “Wouldn’t have figured you for the type to be sensitive about your age.”

“Goodbye, Doctor Watson,” Adrienne says, and slams the door shut. The car disappears into the Baker Street traffic, white chalk sigils still spinning on its tyres.

Joanna knows what to look for, now. She doesn’t forget.

 

++

 

A gibbous moon is rising over Baker Street when Sherlock finally texts.

_Sleeping rough tonight. Reconnaissance, not case; your assistance is not required. SH_

“Oh, I know that face,” Mrs. Hudson says, and dishes another spoonful of peas onto Joanna’s plate. “Wants you to go running off to another one of his crime scenes, does he? With your poor shoulder and the chill in the air—”

“My shoulder’s fine, Mrs. Hudson.” Joanna turns off the phone and tucks it back into her pocket. “Anyway, he doesn’t need me. He only texted to say he wouldn’t be home tonight.”

Mrs. Hudson takes a second helping of the roast for herself and tries not to look too pleased. “Did he? Very considerate of him, to let you know.”

“Very unlike him, you mean.” Joanna sighs and leans over her plate, her elbows wrinkling Mrs. Hudson’s embroidered tablecloth. “We had a sort of…strange encounter last night. That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about.”

Mrs. Hudson’s eyebrows arch suggestively toward her hairline.

Joanna flushes. “With _the bomber_ , Mrs. Hudson. We had a strange encounter with the—” She stops and takes a breath. “He’s dangerous and he’s obsessed with Sherlock. We could be putting you at risk living here.”

Mrs. Hudson reaches across the table and pats her hand. “You needn’t worry about me, Joanna. I have some experience with dangerous men.”

“But—”

“Eat your veg, dear. It’s getting cold.”

Joanna tucks into her meal, and they eat in easy silence for a few minutes. Mrs. Hudson’s kitchen is warm and the food is filling, and for the first time in the last few case-crazed days Sherlock isn’t there to watch as she takes each bite, the great detective either twitching with impatience or silently congratulating himself on the proper feeding of his faithful sidekick.

 _But then, people do get so sentimental about their pets_ , says an echo from the dark of her mind, and she quite calmly stands, walks away from the table, and gags into Mrs. Hudson’s kitchen sink.

“Oh, Joanna,” Mrs. Hudson says, her voice trembling and kind. A hand settles between Joanna’s shoulder blades, rubbing in small, comforting circles. “You’re home, love. You’re safe.”

 _Home is what’s going to kill me_ , Joanna thinks, and gags again.

Eventually the fit passes; Joanna spits the last of the acid from her mouth and lifts her head to run the tap. The water sounds louder than it should, a roar inside her ears, and she shuts it off again. “Sorry,” she croaks. “Got a bit carried away.”

“Nonsense,” Mrs. Hudson says. “Brave girl like you – you’ve nothing to apologise for.” She presses a clean tea towel into Joanna’s hands. “Now: cup of tea or nip of something stronger?”

Joanna shakes her head. “No, I—” She coughs, covering her mouth with the towel. Her throat is raw. “There’s something I need to do, and to do it properly I need your help. Your blessing, at least.” Her leg is steady beneath her, and she walks back to the table. She sits. “I know a way to protect us from Moriarty, but when I tell you what it is, you’re going to think I’ve gone mad.” She glances at the ceiling. “Well. Madder.”

Mrs. Hudson smiles, but her eyes are worried. “A little madness doesn’t bother me, dear.”

“That’s sort of what I’m counting on.” She leans forward, resting her elbows on her knees, and takes a deep breath. “Mrs. Hudson, I want to cast a spell on 221.”

There’s a silence. Mrs. Hudson stares. “You want to—” She hesitates. “A _magic_ spell?”

Joanna nods.

“Like—” Mrs. Hudson raises her hand and wiggles her fingers in Joanna’s direction. “ _Magic_ magic? Abracadabra? That sort of thing?”  

“Yes. Except for the—” Joanna wiggles her fingers. “Not really my style.”

“No, of course not. Silly me.” Mrs. Hudson looks away, and then looks back again. “That’s more than a little mad, love.”

Joanna winces, and the towel twists in her hands. “I know. I wouldn’t have said anything, but the house is yours and that kind of thing, _belonging_ – it matters. A lot more than you’d think.” She swallows and ignores the ache. “It might save Sherlock’s life, Mrs. Hudson. It might save yours. I wouldn’t lie about that.” 

“No,” Mrs. Hudson says. “I don’t think you would.” She sinks into her chair, a delicate hand curled over her mouth. When she lowers it, she’s almost smiling. “Well, then,” she says. “I suppose that means it’s time for us to do some magic.”

 

++

 

It doesn’t take long to gather the necessary materials.

A blue thread snipped from the sleeve of Sherlock’s dressing gown. Black stitching from Mrs. Hudson’s favourite housedress, and white wool from Joanna’s softest, oldest jumper. Three silver sewing needles and three lengths of thread and three slivers of yew wood, sharp-edged and polished red in the low light of the lamps. Mrs. Hudson arranges it all on a tea tray and stands at the foot of the stairs, waiting.

Joanna hesitates on the landing, stuck halfway between the flat and the front hall. She licks her lips. “You don’t have to stay for this part,” she says. “Not if you don’t want to.”

Mrs. Hudson gives her a knowing look. “Gets a bit private, does it?” Her eyes widen. “Ooh, do you dance about with your clothes off? I saw that on telly once – though that was probably a different sort of magic, now that I think of it.”

Joanna laughs, but it comes out strange. “No, it’s nothing like that. I just—” She starts down the stairs, barefoot and slightly unsteady. “I have a spell book, but I’m – I’m improvising, really, and it’s been almost twenty years since I did anything like this.” She reaches the last step and stops. “Actually, I’ve never done anything like this. Not by myself.” 

“All the more reason for me to stay. You shouldn’t be alone if you don’t have to be.” She points to the half empty glass of gin in Joanna’s hand. “And what’s this, then? A little liquid courage?”

“Accelerant, more like.” Joanna looks down at the tea tray. Mrs. Hudson has threaded the needles, the threads black and blue and white; Joanna touches the blue thread, the loop of it through the eye, and then tips her head back and finishes the gin in one gulp. She doesn’t feel the sting as it goes down. “I haven’t told Sherlock.”

Mrs. Hudson takes the empty glass. “You think he won’t believe you.”

“I know he won’t.” Joanna shrugs, tipping a bit to one side. “But hiding things from him is impossible, so I’m not going to bother. I’m not going to lie to him, and I’m not asking you to, either. Mostly because it wouldn’t work, but also—” She stops. Frowns. “Also because it would be wrong.”

Mrs. Hudson sighs. “Joanna, love. You’re drunk.”

Joanna steps off the last stair. “Not for much longer. The fire’ll burn the booze right off.” She takes the tea tray from Mrs. Hudson’s arms and sets it down on the little table near the front door. “This is probably going to look awful, but you have to promise you won’t do anything to stop me. As long as I finish, everything will be all right.” She turns and looks at the other woman over her shoulder. “All right?”

Mrs. Hudson’s fingers are clenched around the empty glass. “Joanna—”

“Do you promise?”

“Yes, I promise,” Mrs. Hudson says. She takes a few steps back, flustered and flushed with concern. “But any damage is coming out of your rent.” 

“Sounds fair to me,” Joanna says, and lets herself fall forward until her hands hit the door.

The front door of 221 is dark wood, solid in its moulded frame and cool against the skin of her palms. Joanna has walked through this door hundreds of times, maybe thousands. She has locked and unlocked it, turned tumblers and thrown bolts, has crossed its threshold time and again and lived for months within the walls of its house – the house that rises around her now, a body of wallpaper and wood and brick. She has counted its steps and scuffed them with her heels, has shouted up to the flat above and down to the basement below and slept and bled and dreamt beneath its tiled roof. A house has bones and flesh, the joints of its floorboards and watching eyes set in window frames and as much as any house has ever been, this is her home. Her bones and her flesh.

James Moriarty would burn it.

He has already tried; he will try again. He will send his man _(Sebastian, the house repeats, remembers, Sebastian Moran)_ and he will break down the door and kill Mrs. Hudson and take Joanna, and all of this only to make Sherlock burn.

The house loves Sherlock the way Sherlock loves his violin, the love of an artist for his art and of a keeper for what is kept. The house will not let Sherlock burn. 

 _Thank you_ , Joanna says, and places the first splinter of yew on her tongue.

It had taken a full glass of gin and Sherlock’s sharpest bone saw to cut the slivers from her grandmother’s cane; the first sits light on her tongue, sour with lemon polish and jagged at the edges. She closes her eyes and mouths the spell around the wood. 

 _Martha Anne Hudson,_ she says, andswallows.

The second splinter scrapes teeth as she slides it past her lips. _Joanna Helene Watson_ , she says without sound, and when the muscles of her throat clench and rebel she claps a hand over her mouth and forces herself to choke it down. She swallows, eyes streaming, and the second splinter joins the first.

She feels the rip and the tear of it, feels blisters of heat beneath her skin like the sparks of a flame yet to catch _(a flame that wants only for fuel)_ and she stumbles, reaches blindly for the tea tray and the final sliver of wood.

 _Sherlock Vernet Holmes_ , she says, tasting blood and the poison bitterness of old-growth yew. The sacrifice and the intent. She swallows, and inside her a flame lights.  

 _We are each of us little more than a candle to burn_ , Gran had said, and Joanna knows it to be true – knows that her body is wax and wick for a flame that consumes, a flame that burned once in the chests of her mother and grandmother and in the hearts of ancestors unnamed and innumerable. Magic passes from mother to daughter to father to son, and a long line of blood and bone and candle flame descends from deathless, ancient Agamede to simple Jo Watson – the broken soldier with a stolen gun. The woman who forgot.  

And yet, Joanna burns.

Fire curls around the fingers of her left hand, rippling over the faded scars of her open palm and singeing the sleeve of her shirt. It moves more like water than flame, really, waves of blue-white heat drawn over skin by the tidal pull of the greater conflagration burning inside. Joanna raises her hand and watches tendrils of fire bloom and wilt and bloom again as they twine about her fingers and thumb. She breathes deep and the flames rise, casting an impossible shadow on the dark wood of the front door.   

 _Get on with it_ , a voice like her grandmother’s says, and Joanna takes the black-threaded needle from the tray and stitches it through the skin of her burning palm.

The world shifts.

Martha Anne Hudson sits on the staircase, holding tight to the banister and half in tears. Joanna sees her face through blind eyes and hears her voice with deaf ears, hears her gasp, “Oh, oh _my_ —” as Joanna makes two more neat stitches with the black thread of her housedress. “Joanna,” she says, “Joanna, that voice—” 

The shadow on the door moves, guiding Joanna’s hand to the dark silhouette of its face; she presses the fire-threaded needle into the wood, just between its eyes. She shudders, bound to the shadow by the length of black thread and flame stretched between them, and reaches for the next needle.

Three stitches of white jumper wool beside black thread and suddenly Mrs. Hudson is gone. Instead she sees herself – sees Joanna Helene Watson standing in the doorway, fair and bright-eyed and burning, sees her face and hears her gasp of breath as the house shifts beneath her naked feet.

 _I am yours_ , a voice says – a voice like her grandmother’s, a voice like bone and wood and brick. _I am yours, and you are safe within these walls._  

The shadow on the door offers Joanna its left hand, palm outstretched; Joanna stabs the sewing needle deep into its open palm, and the silver disappears into the wood. Two threads hang between them, white and black and both burning.

Sherlock’s needle is the third, the last, and when she sews the first blue stitch in the skin of her palm Baker Street disappears. She sees Sherlock Vernet Holmes crouched beneath a bridge in a rain-soaked circle of huddled strangers, his familiar features disguised. She sees his face and hears his hiss of breath as he startles, miles away through the city and the dark. His lips form the silent shape of her name. 

She sews three stitches of blue thread in the palm of her hand, blue beside white beside black. When it’s done, the shadow on the door points her needle towards its heart.

Joanna hesitates, and the house trembles.

 _He is yours,_ says a voice like the groan of floorboards. Like the creak of seventeen stairs. _He must be safe. He must be kept._

She touches the shadow’s heart; the wood is smooth beneath her fingers. “Must he be kept there?”

 _Foolish girl,_ the voice says. _He already is._

The third needle pierces wood, sinking deep into the shadow’s chest. Three needles and three long threads of flame and the circuit is complete. The splinters of yew-wood within her light like kindling, gin-soaked and meant to burn, and they feed the fire until it swallows her whole – until her clothes char black and peel from her skin and she stands before the door naked, aflame.

“James Moriarty,” she says, and there is the echo of another voice beneath her own. “Sebastian Moran.” 

 _I remember_ , the voice says, and the door burns.

Fire licks across her stitched palm, flows through thread and needle to a dark wood that drinks in waves of light like a man dying of thirst. Joanna falls to her knees and the door shudders in its frame, burning bright enough to blind and still hungry. It feeds on her, on the fire inside, and she feels her body grow cold. Slumps to the floor and hears her heartbeat as it slows.   

 _He is mine to keep_ , she thinks, and lets her eyes close.

There is darkness, and then someone slaps her hard across the face.

“Joanna, can you hear me? Oh, I should have known – you’re as bad as he is, and don’t you dare bloody deny it. You might have _warned_ me—” There’s a rush of air as the hand draws back to slap again, and Joanna opens her eyes.

Mrs. Hudson is bent over her, hand raised, face frantic and pale as chalk. The front door is whole and untouched, the skin of Joanna’s palm unbroken; there’s no sign of needle or thread or fire. Except—

“’m naked,” Joanna says, sounding drunk, though she isn’t anymore. “It’s cold.” 

“Obviously,” Mrs. Hudson says with such a familiar note of scorn in her voice that Joanna can’t help but wheeze a laugh. “This isn’t funny, young woman. I’m phoning for an ambulance.”

“No, no, no,” Joanna says, and tries to push herself up. Her arms collapse beneath her, and she falls again. Her mouth tastes like ash. “No, no hospital. Sleep. I only need sleep.”

“It’s either the hospital,” Mrs. Hudson says, “or Sherlock. Your choice.”

“I always choose Sherlock,” Joanna says without quite meaning to, and passes out. 

 

++

 

When she wakes, the room is dark.

The bed is unfamiliar, but the sheets smell like her laundry soap – like Baker Street, and subtle extravagance of Sherlock’s shampoo. She lies curled on her side, facing the faintly lit outline of the bedroom door, and underneath the blankets she’s wearing her dressing gown, a pair of woolly socks, and absolutely nothing else.

There is, of course, a perfectly reasonable explanation for this. If her head would stop pounding, she’d probably be able to remember what it was. 

The facts, then: she has a really terrific hangover, she’s mostly naked, and she’s in Sherlock’s bed.

 _Occam’s bloody razor_ , she thinks, a little hysterically; behind her, a lamp switches on.

“Good, you’re awake. Another hour and I’d have been forced to phone Stamford and request a house call.” Sherlock is sitting beside her, his back against the headboard and his long, pyjama-clad legs stretched out on top of the sheets. He appears to be fascinated by the glowing screen of her mobile. “And no, we didn’t have sex.”

“Oh god.” She shifts to her back and closes her eyes again, tightly. “Are you sure?”

His huff of breath is almost like a laugh. “Quite.”

She stretches a little, testing the stiffness in the muscles of her back and arms. Her bad shoulder aches. “How long have I been asleep?”

“Just over nineteen hours. I can’t be more exact than that – Mrs. Hudson was less than forthcoming with the details. By the time she thought to phone me, you were already unconscious.” He pauses. “Well. Unconscious, nude, and sprawled like a debauched university student across the floor of the front hall.”

Christ, the _warding spell_. She isn’t hung-over; she’s half-dead with magical exhaustion. She turns her face into the pillow and groans. “Mrs. Hudson. She must hate me.”

“Not the first time she’s been forced to deal with the intoxicated ramblings of a naked tenant, and almost certainly not the last. At least you didn’t vomit.”

“I did, though,” Joanna says miserably, into the pillow. “In her kitchen sink.”

“Then yes,” he says, “she probably hates you.” She feels him shift beside her on the bed, and a moment later he presses a cup of cool water into her hands. “A half bottle of gin and you’re sicking up into your landlady’s sink. So much for that famed Watson tolerance.” 

“Fuck off,” she says without much venom, and opens her eyes. Sherlock is a blurred wall of blue dressing gown and disinterest to her left; to her right is the bedroom door and freedom. She tries to sit up, but her arm refuses to support her weight and the cup tips, spilling water down her front. “Sherlock—”

He doesn’t look away from the mobile. “Sorry, can’t help – fucking off.”

“Oh, so you’ll sit there and watch me sleep for nineteen hours, but you won’t help me take a drink of water?”

The mobile is forgotten. He glares down at her, his mouth twisted in an unattractive sneer. “Why should I? This is your weakness, not mine, and I’m not in the habit of coddling drunks – however pathetic they might be.” 

“I appreciate your honesty,” Joanna says, and dumps the cup of water into Sherlock’s lap.

There’s something distinctly gratifying about his shout of surprise. “Joanna!”

“I’ll just take my horrible human weakness and go, shall I?” She slides out of the bed and manages a single step before her legs turn to jelly and she falls to the floor in an undignified, half-dressed heap. She presses her cheek to the floorboards and sighs. “Bugger. That was a good exit line, too.”

“One of your better attempts, certainly,” Sherlock says, and before she can object he’s scooped her off the floor and into his arms, carrying her back to the bed like she’s a newly-wed sack of bloody potatoes. She covers her face with her hand and groans.

“Please,” she says, “kill me now. Before the humiliation takes me.”

“Shut up.” He sets her down on the bed entirely too gently, her back against the headboard and the blankets tucked around her hips. His expression is anything but gentle. “You’re an idiot.”

She crosses her arms over her chest. “Fine. So are you.”

“ _Fine_ ,” he says, almost spitting, and stomps out of the room. He doesn’t go far; she hears him in the kitchen, banging through the cabinets and running the tap. Then the tap shuts off, and he stomps back in and thrusts another cup of water at her. “Mrs. Hudson was terrified.”

Joanna blinks stupidly at him. “What? When?”

“When she phoned. She said you’d had too much to drink, but you actively avoid alcohol when under stress. I’d anticipated a number of likely responses to the incidents of the past few days, but a bare-arsed, gin-fuelled binge wasn’t one of them.” He looks down at the cup of water still in his hand. “Mrs. Hudson was frightened for you, and I thought—” He stops, his jaw clenched. “I formed a conclusion without sufficient data.”

A light dawns. “You were worried.”

He hesitates, and then meets her eyes. “I was – concerned. For your safety.”

“You thought it was Moriarty. That he’d got to me somehow.” _Again_ , she doesn’t say, but of course he hears it. His gaze flinches away, but only for a moment.

“Before I examined you, yes. I wasn’t sure Mrs. Hudson would be able to recognise the symptoms of some of the less obvious poisons.” He sits on the edge of the bed, his hip against her knee. “I know you very well, Joanna.”

She takes the water. “You know everyone very well. It’s sort of your thing.”

“You are deliberately missing the point.”

“Sherlock, right now I have all the muscle strength of a malnourished kitten; I’m not deliberately doing anything.” The water is cold, and it might be the best thing she’s ever tasted. She moans into the cup. “God, that’s amazing. I had no idea how thirsty I was.”

“I did.”

“Doesn’t take a genius to deduce that someone with a hangover might be a bit dehydrated.” She nudges him with her knee. “Thank you for the water.”

Sherlock sniffs. “Don’t get used to it.” 

She takes another long drink from the cup. “Right. Because you’re not in the habit of coddling drunks.”

He scowls at her. “I already apologised for that. You can’t bring it up if I’ve apologised.”

“An apology – a sincere apology – usually includes some variation on the words _I’m sorry_ or _I was wrong_. Believe me, I’d have noticed if you’d said anything like that.”

“Obviously not.” He looks at the ceiling, takes a deep breath, and exhales in a long hiss of annoyance. “You’re not honestly going to make me – Joanna, I thought you were in danger. I was concerned. I was wrong.” He meets her eyes again. “There, I’ve said it so simply even an unusually dim child could understand. Are you happy now?”

“Ecstatic.” She sets the empty cup on the beside table. “You said you didn’t expect the drinking. What ‘likely responses’ did you expect?”

He ticks them off on his fingers. “Violence, camaraderie, or sex.” He pauses, considering. “Or some combination of the three. The man very nearly immolated you, after all – a bit of hedonistic excess on your part is hardly outside the bounds of probability.”

Joanna snickers. “Yeah, you know me and my hedonistic excesses. I’m an animal.”

Sherlock pauses, a twitch of a smile at the corner of his mouth. “Do you doubt my reasoning?”

“No,” she says quickly. “No, not at all. I just—”

He raises the first finger. “Violence soothes you. You have a particular talent for it, and indulging that talent gives you a sense of concrete purpose and control that you crave during times of uncertainty. But you can’t simply start a fight – not with that pesky moral code of yours and its pedestrian distaste for collateral damage. No, you rely on your rather less than pedestrian flatmate for your fix, and while normally I would have obliged with an appropriately dangerous case, my attention was needed elsewhere. So – camaraderie or sex.”

“Or both, I suppose,” Joanna says, a wry note of warning in her voice. Sherlock continues, tone-deaf.

“Yes, but not from the same source – your options for friendly companionship are considerably more limited. You do think of me as a strange sort of comrade in arms, but as has already been established, I was otherwise occupied. That leaves Mrs Hudson, Mike Stamford, or Lestrade. Good souls all, but none of them likely to welcome you into their bed any time soon.” He smirks. “At least, not until Lestrade’s wife leaves him again. Bit of a wait on that one, though – two months, minimum. Not sure he’s worth it, honestly; you’ve seen the man try to open a packet of crisps.”

Joanna closes her eyes and very carefully doesn’t smack him. “Sherlock, I’m dating Sarah. If I’m going to sleep with anyone—”

“Please. Sarah isn’t an idiot; she’s seen what our life is like, and she isn’t going to let your relationship advance any further than it already has: the sofa. No – as I’m sure you’ve realised by now, you’d have far better luck with a one-night stand. Something amiable and anonymous and emotionally undemanding – possibly with a woman, more likely with a man.” She opens her eyes to see him sweeping her body with a long, dispassionate look. “You’d want to be the dominant party in either case, and I doubt you’d hear any complaints. You may not be a conventionally beautiful woman, but your high level of sexual confidence and proficiency makes you an unusually stimulating partner.” 

The pounding ache in her head has returned. “Jesus,” she says, almost laughing. “I really don’t want to know how you think you know that.”

“The same way I know everything. I pay attention.” He climbs over her legs and settles on the other side of the bed with a huff. “Your reactions to stress are entirely predictable, and yet you spent last night alone in the flat drowning yourself in a bottle of cheap gin. There must be something, some piece of information I’ve missed.” He slumps back against the headboard and scrubs his fingers through his hair. “What am I not seeing?”

Joanna turns over her left hand and looks at the faded scars there, the old wounds crossing the creased lines of her palm. “I don’t think you’ve missed anything,” she says. The words are slow, almost careful. Dream-like. She feels their weight on her tongue. “You’ve seen everything you need to see. You just haven’t found an explanation that fits the evidence.”  

Sherlock stills beside her. “What evidence?”

She holds out her hand, offering him her scarred palm. “You’re the detective,” she says. “You tell me.”

For a long moment, he says nothing. He doesn’t look away from her face. “I saw those scars the day we met.”

“You didn’t mention them.”

“They weren’t relevant.” He cups her open hand in his, circling her wrist with two long fingers. “Last night you used my favourite bone saw to cut into your grandmother’s cane in three places. You hesitated before the first two cuts, but your hands were steady – you didn’t want to do it, but you felt you had no other choice.” His index finger settles over her pulse. “I don’t know why.”

She swallows. “Are you asking?”

The mattress moves beneath them as he shifts, easing closer. “The clothes you wore yesterday are gone. Shirt, trousers, bra, pants, everything. If you’d stripped naked in some sort of drunken haze, your clothes would be scattered about the flat. Instead they’re just – gone. Not in the bin, not in the wash, not flushed down the toilet nor burnt to ash in the fireplace. You disposed of them somehow, and I don’t know why.” The circle of his fingers tightens around her wrist. “You texted my brother and asked him my middle name.”

His grip is strong, but she could pull free if she wanted to. Instead, she leans into his side. Their shoulders touch, lightly. “I did. It would have been better if you’d told me yourself, but I didn’t think you’d want to be disturbed.” She flexes the tendons of her wrist, and they move in his grasp. “How do you know what clothes I was wearing? You were gone when I woke up.”

“I followed you to Mycroft’s office.”  

She smiles, unsurprised. “But you never saw me leave.”

He shakes his head. His gaze is still fixed on their hands. His skin against hers. “No,” he says. “I didn’t.” The calloused tip of his finger maps the scar tissue of her palm, the touch impersonal and maddeningly light. Her breathing changes, deepens, and her knuckles brush the soft underside of his wrist. She watches the rise and fall of his chest and marks its rhythm as it slows to match hers. “These scars are from self-inflicted wounds,” he says finally, his voice low. “All more than twenty years old, none of them serious. Some were made with a small knife, but most with a sharp, slender tool with a pointed tip.” He looks up and meets her eyes. “A sewing needle.”

She holds his gaze and nods.

“They would have been difficult to hide or pass off as simple clumsiness. You were a child; someone would have intervened. Your sister or your grandmother – if you were hurting yourself, they would have stopped you.” His eyes darken with understanding and disbelief. “Unless,” he says, “you had their _approval_.”

“Never Harry’s,” Joanna says, and just stops herself from saying more. She looks down at their hands, at his fingers cupping hers in a gentle parody of palmistry or affection. “Not all the cuts were self-inflicted.”

His index finger follows the longest scar where it crosses the heart of her palm. “What was it? The edge of a broken bottle?”

“No,” she says. “A mirror. He smashed it with a hammer.” She smiles and feels the bite of the glass. The boy’s hand folding hard around hers. “I’d hurt him, so he hurt me.”

For an inexplicable moment, Sherlock hesitates. “Who was he?”

“A boy I knew.”

“What happened?”

She shrugs a little, and her shoulder bumps against his. “Nothing. He forgot me.” She slides her wrist free from his long-fingered grip. He lets her. “I hate to say it, but I’m going to need the toilet soon.”

His hands fall back to his lap. “I can carry you.”

“Yeah, that’s not going to happen.” She slides slowly out of the bed and gives her legs time to adjust to her weight. After a minute’s patience, she’s standing. She cinches the belt of the dressing gown tighter around her waist. “If you hear me fall, don’t come after me. Either let me crawl to the toilet on my hands and knees like a man or leave me in the corridor to die.”

“Irrational pride _and_ melodrama,” Sherlock drawls. “How charming.”

“Well, I did learn from the best.” She shuffles to the bedroom door. “The ‘best’ is you, in case you were wondering.”

“Joanna,” he says, and she stops just inside the room. He sits stiff-backed against the headboard, his pale face framed by the long shadows the bedside lamp casts on the wall. She thinks of the wonder in his eyes when the warding spell touched him. The shape of his lips as he silently spoke her name. “If I asked,” he says, “would you tell me?”

She’s going to die for him, one day. That’s the only secret she truly needs to keep.

“If you asked,” she says, and leaves him alone in the lamplight.


End file.
